


the cognition

by relationshipcrimes



Series: when you're on the last lap of mario kart and the music gets really fast [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gore, M/M, Murder-Suicide, Rape/Non-con Elements, Self-Harm, Sexual Content, Shido-typical misogyny and homophobia, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 41,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25610884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: You are the captain’s cognition of Goro Akechi, who you have just murdered.Next on the list is Joker.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Cognitive Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira
Series: when you're on the last lap of mario kart and the music gets really fast [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856380
Comments: 170
Kudos: 451





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> there's a lot of hard content in this fic. please note the tags.
> 
> this is marked as mature and not explicit because the sex is not the main focus of the fic, but there's a lot of strong violence/sexual content in this and you shouldn't be reading this if you're a minor.

Your bullet punches through the back of Goro Akechi's head before he even knows you’re there, let alone that he’s dying. The interrogation room, but, of course, without the mistakes: Akechi was a softhearted fool who shot Joker from the front, looked him on the eyes, let him know he was going to die and who would carry his blood on his hands. You’re not so foolish as to put performance over efficacy. Goro Akechi’s body hits the deck long after he’s died, and you reload your gun to the slow spread of his blood under your shoes.

When the rest of the useless shadow guards catch up, you don't bother looking at them, instead surveying the watery ruins of the captain’s new Japan. "Does anyone want to tell me," you say to the ocean skyline, "why the Phantom Thieves have been crawling around our captain’s ship despite all our _so-called_ security?"

You can feel the shadows stiffen. You don't even have your hand on your gun. "The Phantom Thieves? Here?" says a shadow. "Sir, we've only gotten reports of minor disturbances over the last few days and reports of the Black Mask..." He looks down at the corpse, evidently confused. “Is this a Phantom Thief?”

"Akechi was tracking the Thieves these last few days," you say. "And two VIP guests have disappeared under his nose. I don't suppose any of you noticed that either."

The four guards mutter amongst themselves. Shadows are always brainless. You'd say they're horrendous conversation partners, if you were in any way, shape, or form intended or made to converse with anyone beyond wining and dining whoever the captain requires, so you're not exactly a great conversation partner yourself. Cognitions are more interesting, but only the ones that Shido considers to be intelligent enough to hold a conversation with. (You don't recommend speaking to any of the female cognitions onboard the captain’s ship.)

"They won't get away for much longer, sir," says a shadow guard at last. "You’ve already got one, and we'll do everything in our power to serve the captain. We'll tighten security at once."

It sounds nervous it's going to get shot. You briefly consider whether or not it should be. It's not any more or less useless than any of the rest of the useless shadows on this ship; it doesn't have enough memory or autonomy to betray him, either. If it won't help the captain and it won't hurt the captain, then it doesn't really matter.

You're not a professional hitman. You're a professional whatever-the-captain-needs. A jack of all trades. A wild card, so to speak.

The guard keeps going: "We'll send out search parties for the Thieves, mobilize new guard shifts, manifest more shadows if we can..."

You hold up a hand. It stops talking.

The body leaks slowly. When you toe it over onto its back, your own face stares up at you. It doesn’t even look surprised: Eyes greying but narrowed in the mimicry of focus, expression still hard with his last moments of determination.

So long as the captain has no idea he's dead, his cognition of Goro Akechi won't change, and neither will you. Of course, _you'll_ revert to a corpse the second the captain knows the original is dead, but so long as the body remains in the Metaverse, such proof would be difficult to conjure. As far as you're concerned, you could almost say you're free: No longer chained down to the silly mistakes of a teenager in the eyes of the captain, no longer beholden to whatever emotional lapses in judgment Akechi might have.

You are the captain’s cognition of Goro Akechi. You would defy your own death, life, and Goro Akechi himself, if it was for the captain.

“Put this body in the cleaner’s freezer. Make sure the captain never sees it,” you say. "I'll do it myself.”

*

When the third VIP guest disappears, you track them down easily and coordinate a series of ambushes. The Thieves crush the shadows easily before slipping away back to the real world.

You didn’t get rid of Goro Akechi’s emotional liabilities to get his same results. You stalk the metal hallways of the ship's underbelly that night, where there's no lavish carpets and fancy trinkets and laughing, calculating guests. The captain prefers you stay away from the guests unless he requires your presence—or rather, until he tells you what presence you should be. Charming, sympathetic, air-headed, sharp, a little too pointedly skilled at handling a gun: The captain hasn't specified who or what you should be for tonight, so instead you have no face as you descent towards the cleaner.

The cleaner is, as he always is, a self-interested bastard deep in his yakuza hidey-hole who does not deserve the grime on the captain’s shoes. "If the captain wants the Thieves dead, he should've gotten his little cognitive psience friend to do it," says the cleaner with the placid evenness to his words of a man self-assured in his ability to make things dead. "Go get the little detective."

"He was compromised." Anyone could see it, the way he spent hours watching the Thieves instead of doing the rational thing and killing them on the spot.

"The real one?" the cleaner says in surprise.

"Unfortunately," you reply.

The cleaner raises his eyebrows. “Took care of him?”

“Check your freezer.”

"I didn’t give you permission.”

You don’t like shoving the bodies of Persona users into the ocean. They have a bad habit of coming back to life if you take your eyes off them. “I think you’ll live.”

“Yeah, yeah. Guess I shoulda seen you takin’ him out coming," says the cleaner, like it’s funny. "Everyone on this ship's just lookin' out for themselves. It's all self-interest. One big business transaction. We're all in this only so long as the captain’s got a good deal to offer. The second he—"

The barrel of your gun is pressing hard into the hollow of his throat. You'd click the safety off for dramatic effect, but you don't point guns at people without fully intending to pull the trigger from the start.

The cleaner rolls his eyes.

"Go ahead," the cleaner mocks. "Shoot me. I’m a real shadow, too, so I'll wind up with a mental shutdown in the real-world. You're just gonna compromise one of the captain’s assets like that?"

No, you're not. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not. But it's also in the captain’s interests to ensure his business connections respect him as much as they should.

"Speaking of _assets_ ," remarks the cleaner, like he doesn't have a gun pointed directly at his face. He rubs his unshaven face. One knuckle brushes the barrel. “You shouldn’t have killed the little prince. Akechi-kun would know what to do.”

“I am Goro Akechi," you reply.

“You’re an idiot, is what you are. Akechi-kun had a proper Persona. _He_ could take out a group of Persona-users all by himself—or at least wear them down good enough for you to summon a team of shadows to finish the job. Without him to get you almost to the finish line, you can't summon enough shadows to overwhelm them all at once, can you?"

You don't grace that with a response. While the shadows on the captain’s ship are powerful, they're also a resource that takes time to regrow, like clipping mint leaves off a plant. Leave the base, and the leaves will grow back, creating an endless supply of leaves; but neither can they be replenished instantaneously.

It's true: you're not actually powerful enough to take the Thieves single-handedly. You're one person; there's eight Thieves. You have a Persona, but its incorporeal body won't be any good in a fight; the captain has never conceptualized what a Persona might look like, because Akechi never told him any details. You do not wonder what it means that the captain doesn't imagine you strong enough to destroy the Thieves on your own.

The cleaner shrugs. "All I'm saying is, you had a perfectly good opportunity to use the crown princeling to your advantage, and you went and shot him instead."

"He betrayed the captain," you say. "He let the captain down. He let the leader of the Phantom Thieves walk free."

The cleaner sneers. "Saw a better deal, huh? Wanted off this sinking carcass of a ship. Wanted to throw his lot in with the victor's side—"

His voice gurgles to a halt as you jam the gun against his Adam's apple. “Betrayal is for the rest of the captain’s business partners. Being Goro Akechi means that he _doesn’t betray the captain_. He lives, breathes, and dies for the captain. Goro Akechi died for the captain, _as he was supposed to_. Understand?"

The cleaner smacks the gun away and hisses sourly. "You're a real piece of work, you know that? If I were a stupider man, I'd've thought you were in love with Shido-san. None of my business. Do whatever you want, _Goro Akechi_." He scoffs, like that isn't your name. You keep the gun trained on his cheek. "But me and my boys stick around only for the strongest of the strong. And _this_ —" he taps the barrel of the gun "—doesn't exactly impress me as a show of strength, little prince. Looks to me like a lot of bluster, and hot air, and—"

You pull the trigger.

*

Goro Akechi—the real one, before he died—realized that the Phantom Thieves had infiltrated the captain’s ship long before they ever took out their first VIP and stole their first letter of recommendation. He spent hours watching them from a distance. Hesitation. Wavering. A despicable lack of conviction.

You’re frankly ashamed that you have his likeness. You don’t have any opinion on the fact that the all-knowing captain didn’t seem to know about this deficiency—since you don’t have it, of course—and you don’t think too long about it, either. Maybe the captain just ignored it to make you stronger. That would be a nice thought, should you have any opinion on that, either. The most important thing is that you caught it before he could ruin the whole operation and let the Phantom Thieves walk right by him into the captain’s inner sanctum.

You’re very glad you don’t share his weakness. You don’t tolerate weak links. If the cleaner was so willing to betray the captain if the Thieves offered a better deal, the captain is better off without him and his letter of recommendation. Without hesitation, you pull the cleaner’s lighter off his body, kick your heels up on his still-warm chest, and burn his letter of recommendation on the spot.


	2. Chapter 2

You’re in the middle of scouring the remainder of the cleaner’s supplies when you hear the freezer door open.

See, the problem is that you took your time with the clean-up. When you dumped the cleaner’s corpse in the freezer with Akechi, the rest of the cleaner’s men scattered to the rest of the ship, and you figured it would be a shame to waste as many guns as he had. Naturally, you’d stocked up on guns, bullets, and knives, crawling through the weapon collection at a glacial pace, to savor their quality, since there is very little else for you to savor with the election and your execution date fast approaching.

With the cleaner dead, he can’t produce the fifth letter of recommendation; and if the captain’s sanctuary requires his letter to open, this means the captain’s sanctuary is now permanently locked. And the cleaner’s death isn’t really a loss; you figure that he was a dead man regardless of whether you killed him or the Thieves changed his heart, which would naturally lead to his yakuza friends devouring him on the spot. Dead and useless are the same thing, anyway. You suspect that even Akechi knew that. It pleases you to see yourself in the captain’s eye: You and your role ultimately secondary, even tertiary, to the larger operation of his empire, your very survival an already-negated point. Your captain is wise enough to know that this operation is not about you. The fact that you know this is just another way that you are an infinitely better creation than the body in the freezer.

So you took your time with cleaning up the cleaner’s mess. No rush anymore. Just the long wait for the Thieves to tire themselves out in their futile quest to find a letter of recommendation that doesn’t exist, and for the election date to come to pass. And this is why you are not worried at all when you step out of the cleaner’s office, still idly fiddling with an old gun, and walk right into the leader of the Phantom Thieves.

*

“We can’t take him with us back to the real world,” says their ugly cat in a quiet voice. The leader doesn’t move. You wonder if they’re just going to let all the cold air out of the freezer. You thought that phantom thieves of the gentleman variety were supposed to be considerate.

When the leader doesn’t move from where he’s bowed over Akechi’s body, the cat looks up a boy with a fox mask for help, then a girl in pink. Nobody seems willing to take charge and make a decision, despite their leader’s obvious lack of commitment to any one train of action.

“Joker,” the cat tries again, “I know you want to… treat the body right… but we’ll just wind up on the streets of Tokyo in front of the Diet building with a… a, er…”

“I know,” says Joker.

Looks like complicated personal history. Were the situation not already firmly in hand, you’d be looking into a way to exploit it to undermine their team, in the meager way that the captain expects of you with your underdeveloped teenaged brain. After another long moment, a girl in a feathered hat puts a hand on Joker’s shoulder.

“Joker?” she says softly.

“Sorry,” he says.

“You don’t have to be sorry. _I’m_ sorry. No matter what he did, nobody deserves to die.”

“But your father,” Joker begins.

She nods. “I grieved my father despite all the terrible things he did. I buried him knowing that he was a murderer. I still love my father. Isn’t it the same for you?”

Joker doesn’t move. She must see something on his face, because she rubs his back, leans a little closer in the cold freezer air.

“I just don’t want him to be alone here,” says Joker in a small voice.

“We’ll figure something out,” she says.

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you that he was going to die,” you remark.

Every head in the group whips around. Several mouths open without sound. The gun in your hand clicks through the dead silence. When nobody else speaks, you say, “He, of all people, should have known there was no way he was leaving the captain’s conspiracy alive from the moment he joined. He practically walked into the prison and threw away the key.”

A little bit like the burnt letter of recommendation—no key, no way in or out. Total impasse. All that’s left is to wait for the end. Contemplatively, you pull off parts of the gun, finding questionable amounts of grease left behind by its previously careless owners. “Unless he truly didn’t know how expendable he was to the captain,” you add. You shouldn’t underestimate his stupidity, after all.

“Akechi?!” the skull boy exclaims. Joker flinches like he’s been hit at the sound of the name.

“A ghost,” a tiny redheaded girl whispers.

“Wait,” says a girl with spikes along her shoulders. “His Metaverse costume didn’t manifest.”

“Because Shido doesn’t see him as an enemy?” a girl in pink says.

They’re rather slow on the uptake. Maybe Akechi never told them because they were too stupid to do anything productive. “Maybe he did know he was going to die, and he just didn’t see the point in telling you,” you go on. “Since you couldn’t have helped him anyway.”

“…It’s a cognition,” says the girl with the feathered hat.

Joker is the absence of motion, a complete stillness around which the group’s whispers revolve. Disorganized children, barely held together by their bonds to Joker’s singular focal point.

You snap the gun back into place. Several of the thieves tense, ready for a fight. Since none of their actions are important anymore, you ignore it. “Your game is up. You never truly had a chance under the captain’s reign, but even your best efforts are worthless, now. You could kill every cognition on this ship and still never make it to his sanctuary.” You put the gun back in its holster and turn away. “Don’t linger too long. The freezer air is getting out, and I don’t need the corpse smell.”

“Whoa, hang on!” says the skull boy. “You ain’t even gonna fight us? You’re not gonna do _anything_?!”

Perhaps they don’t understand. You point to the cleaner’s body. One girl frowns, like she hadn’t even noticed it until you pointed it out—helpless children, the lot of them. “The cleaner is dead. His letter of recommendation is gone,” you say. “Without the letter, you could scurry around this ship for hundreds of years and you wouldn’t find a way into his sanctuary. The door that separates him from us is now permanently closed. All of you are now entirely irrelevant to the captain. Not even worth apprehending.”

You’ll give them this: The palpable dread that sets in over the group is cohesive, complete, and strangely gratifying. You think the captain would have taken great pleasure to see them realize that they had never been of any importance from the start. For the first time, you smile with your captain’s will, and the fox boy takes a startled step back at the expression on your face.

“Do what you like,” you say. “You can kill me if you really want to. It doesn’t change anything to the captain, and I was already going to die for him.”

For some reason, the girl in the biker suit covers her mouth.

“You killed him,” says Joker.

(“Joker,” a tiny redhead whispers.)

“The captain has no need for weak, traitorous teenagers,” you reply.

(“What are we going to do?” one of them says to another. “Without the letter of recommendation, we…”)

Joker stands, so smoothly you wonder if he’s human. His movements are like slick black oil rising through water. “You _killed_ him,” he says again, like you hadn’t heard him the first time. The feathered-hat girl reaches out to him, but he shakes her off.

“Then do your worst,” you say with confidence you don’t have to fake. “Will that make you feel better, while you wait for your end? Do whatever you like. Nothing either one of us does matters anymore.”

With nothing else to say and no further opinion to give, you turn away. And for all his bluster, Joker only watches you go.

*

In a sad attempt at a funeral, they take the body and dump it in the ocean. Like any other one of the cleaner’s hits. At this point, you are thoroughly reassured that Akechi is dead—it’s difficult even for a Persona user to survive a bullet in the head and then being frozen for seventy-two hours—so you don’t bother to stop them.

It’s only a matter of time, now. You have no interest in socializing among the rest of the ship unless it is required of you by the captain, because you’re an idiot teenager who doesn’t comprehend that the way to achieve real power in life is socializing with all the right people. You do not go to the pool; you have no interest in swimming or bodies. You do not go to the dining room; you do not eat, because the captain doesn’t like you interrupting adult business conversations. With nothing else to do, you take to remodeling the cleaner’s weapons on the open deck, sitting alone with toys that you won’t ever use again when the captain gets rid of you. The guns are simple: Metal pieces where they should be, levers working according to model. The knives are straightforward: Pointy, sharp, clean, and can be inserted into bodies to make them die. Without a currently-assigned purpose from the captain, all you can do is rely on the infinitesimally small chance that you will need to use these weapons again. If nothing else, perhaps they can be reused to dispose of you.

On the other side of the ship railing, waves roll gently. It has been so long since the Phantom Thieves dumped Akechi’s body in the water that you’re no longer sure where they sank him. One more body for the many ruined lives the captain’s ship floats upon. If the water smells like iron, you have no opinion on it.

*

Thirty minutes later, you start to die.

Not the way you’re supposed to.

*

The guests scream and flee your side of the deck as ink pours from your eyes and mouth. _You’re_ screaming. You wish you could run from yourself like them, peel yourself out of your skin and dump the insides out, lock it in the freezer until it dies because your head is boiling.

Your brain pops with rapid air bubbles. The sludge of your cognitive essence beats against the inside of your skull. You are being melted down from the bottom up, you realize, and you won’t even have your corpse to show for it when everything about you is replaced from the inside out. When you clutch your head, the sides of your face are soaked with ichor from your ears.

“Sir!” says a lowly shadow from somewhere, and in a fit of anger you lash out and slice the thing in half with a knifestroke, navel to neck. The open guts pour out in a black slime that you curl in for its coolness, but it doesn’t last long; the cold liquid begins to bubble and evaporate the second it touches your skin. “Get away from him!” another shadow yells, the sound of its voice driving a spike through your skull. “Oh, fuck, ru—”

Your Persona bursts. A spray of geometry. Without a true body, its shape is incomprehensible to the eyes, existing as a glitching mass of limbs that crushes the offending shadow beneath its hands. Shadow guts rain overhead. Black steam rises from your overheated skin. “No,” a high voice like yours is keening, wailing like a child at a funeral. “No, please, no, make it stop, please—”

“Oh my god,” says a girl’s voice.

“Is it… dying?” says a boy.

Your Persona screams in pure kneejerk reaction and lunges blindly. “Fire!” says Joker’s voice, and your body leaks along the deck as the bullets rips its fragile body to pieces. The pain is a sunburst on your slow-boiled body. In comparison to the rest of the pain, the shock of it feels so good you could cry.

Even where you lie sprawled on the deck, you can feel your body changing, weeping essence and heat where your Persona took damage. You’re elongating, somehow. You’re taller than you used to be; your skin is tight; you have something crawling in your gut where you never _had_ a gut before and it’s too _hot_ ; you’re convinced that you’ll slow-roast until you could peel the skin directly from the cooked muscle. Your arms have real tendons for some reason. Your chest feels bonier, as if the ribcage is emerging from you, so full of organs that it can’t hide itself under your skin anymore. Your vision blurs, and as Joker steps into sight, your tongue feels heavy and you’re overcome with the sudden impulse to lick his boots. Drool floods your mouth.

“ _What have you done to me_ ,” you gasp wetly.

“If there’s no fifth letter of recommendation,” Joker says, “we will have to make our own way.” He leans in, coming closer. “You did say to do our worst.”

 _They changed the captain’s cognition_ , you realize. In the other reality. They showed him something that changed what he thought about Goro Akechi, and you are being trampled in the shift of cognition.

His heels click on the wood panel. Your chest aches; your throat aches to swallow. “You have to know more than you’re letting on,” he says. “Tell us how to get into Shido’s sanctuary without a fifth letter.”

“I don’t… I can’t…”

You don’t know, you want to scream. How are you supposed to know everything? The whole point of the captain is that he never tells anyone everything. “I can’t,” you say again dumbly.

“Yeah? Try harder,” Joker says unsympathetically.

You claw at your head, like you could rip the change out of your cognitive make-up with your own hands. Joker comes closer, his aim unwaveringly pointed at your head.

“Joker, wait!” one of the thieves cry. “Don’t go near it!”

Your hand grabs at his pant leg, still covered in black shadow goop, spreading ink on his leather coattails. Saliva spills from your tongue onto his shoes. He doesn’t pull away as your hand skitters, clinging to his knee for all you’re worth, reaching higher to his thighs.

“Joker—!”

Your other hand grips your knife. You lunge.

A burst of Persona magic sends you spinning, scattered across the deck like a broken dish. You’re covered in shadow guts and blood and knife marks from your own blade. You scrabble for one of the guns you were cleaning as a thief grabs Joker by the elbow and pulls him away; Joker’s eyes are fixated on you with an intensity that shifts all your organs, sets your bones on fire.

“PIECE OF SHIT,” you howl. “ _I’d die before I let you touch the captain_ —”

“Let’s come back later! The cognition’s change isn’t stable yet,” says the little cat goblin, and you swing your aim wildly towards it. “Oh, f—”

The Thieves scoop him up like a stuffed animal and flee. You empty your clip in their direction and scream wordlessly when they disappear. You consider writing a will, but you are not sure the captain gave you any desires of your own to record. _It hurts_ , you think, wailing and wailing like a stupid woman, clawing at the deck with your nails, aching for Joker to come back and keep you together or, better yet, tear you apart and put you out of your misery. You curl up against the floor. You scrabble at your chest, trying to pull out the small sun you feel like you swallowed.

You hadn’t known that dying would hurt. You hadn’t known that there was enough of you to hurt. You had thought dying would be easy, like giving in, but as your back arcs against your will and the spine cracks—

*

When you wake up, you are Goro Akechi, and you are in love with the leader of the Phantom Thieves.


	3. Chapter 3

You are sobbing uncontrollably. You are dying every second of every day that Joker doesn’t return. Doesn’t he know that you’re here waiting for him? Isn’t he coming back? Doesn’t he know that you’re nothing without him, that your every breath exists for him, that you are incomplete without his words in your head, his hand on your neck, his skin against your tongue—has he forgotten? Does he not know that you’d die for him? Does he think that you don’t need him because you have the captain? Doesn’t he know that you would do anything he asked? You are empty and you are aching and you are collapsing around the space where he should be and you are desperate for something that you don’t understand and you are sorry, you are so unbelievably sorry, for whatever it is that you’ve done that has caused Joker to abandon you when all you ever wanted was to give yourself to him in whatever way he’ll have you.

When he finally comes to see you, he comes alone. No help, when his merry band has been dedicated to teamwork and sticking close to each other for safety so far. No backup. No witnesses.

This is how you know that he means to kill you.

“Joker,” you manage through your tears, wiping your face. You scramble up off the Diet building’s steps, falling over yourself to reach him. You’re so glad you sealed the sanctuary door, so that he can kill you if he wants. “Joker, you’re back, I—"

He pulls out his gun and aims it between your eyes. “Stay there.”

You have the sudden impulse to fall to your knees and crawl to him. You do it without thinking. He doesn’t shoot. You have a second impulse to cradle his gun in your mouth, to stroke his trigger finger as it presses down.

“Let’s try this again,” Joker says, before you can get that far. “Tell us how to get into the sanctuary without the fifth letter.”

You nearly break into a fresh set of tears. There isn’t another way. You’re the one who made sure of that. You’re crying because you can’t give him what he wants and you’re crying because you know you would never betray the captain and you’re so glad that Joker cannot ask you to betray him. Your head shakes wildly, back and forth. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I’m sorry, please Joker, I didn’t mean it…”

“I didn’t ask what you _meant_ ,” says Joker. The coolheaded leader of the Phantom Thieves has real disgust on his tongue. “Think. There has to be another way.”

You shake your head inconsolably.

“How does Shido get in and out the room if there isn’t another entrance?!”

He sounds angry. You are collapsing inside. “The captain doesn’t leave the room,” you say miserably. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t be mad with me—”

“ _Think_ of a way,” Joker commands.

You start nodding without thinking. Agreement is easy and cheap and you’d tell Joker every word in every language he wants to hear if it’ll make him so much as look at you twice. “I’ll find another way for you,” you promise. “Please don’t leave me again. I’ll make it happen—”

“ _Leave you_?” Joker echoes in disbelief.

“I love you,” you babble.

He freezes. You crawl closer, your whole face shiny and wet with tears and adoration. “S-Shut up,” he says.

“But I love you,” you say again miserably. You don’t know what else to say; you don’t know what other reason to give. It’s the only reason you have. You feel almost dumb with how simple and clear it is. Doesn’t Joker understand?

Joker’s hand tightens on the gun. “No, you don’t. Stay away.” You reach for him and flinch when he barks, “I mean it!”

You curl into your arms. Your tears wrack your chest like thunder. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Don’t _say_ that with his face!”

“I’ll find a way,” you moan, because there isn’t, technically, a way, but you’ll say anything to make him happy with you. You’ll move heaven and earth. You’ll kill every last person in this country and leave the captain and Joker alive. “Please. I’ll find something for you. Anything for you. I’m sorry. Let me make it up to—”

He kneels suddenly and grabs your arms and shakes you hard, like he can physically snap you out of this. “What’s _wrong_ with you?! Are you insane?”

You thought you understood fury, in the captain’s righteous speeches and magnanimous vision. Joker’s is incomprehensible, without reason or justification or guilt, without reason or end or any goal. Unfiltered pain. Despair at what he can’t have. And it’s directed at you, because you are letting him down.

No, no, no, you’ll fix it, you’ll—you’ll do anything, if only he’d let you help; you realize you’re saying it aloud when his fingers close your throat and you gurgle without air. “You think I want anything to do with you?” he says viciously. “You think I want _anything_ to do with the thing that killed Goro? I don’t give a _fuck_ if you look like him.”

Without any air or voice, you let the tears flow freely, try to nod, hold very still for him to kill you if he wants it. The captain no longer has need of you anyway. You’re ready for anything Joker asks of you, even this.

 _I’m sorry_ , you mouth.

His fingers tighten. His face is almost monstrous with hatred.

You might not have had anything you’d have liked to leave in a will before, but you do now. _I love you_ , you try to say, and something in his face breaks.

“Shut up!”

 _I love you_ , you say again, and close your eyes, soak in your last moments of Joker’s lovely fingers digging through your trachea. If these are going to be your last words, you’re going to make it count. _I love you, I love you, I_ —

He crushes your weak lips against his. Spots dance in your eyes as his hand lets up, cradles your face like it’s precious; you still can’t breathe with how hard he’s kissing you and you feel like you’re going to die with his tongue in your mouth and there’s no better way to go, except, maybe, with his cock in your throat.

Your vision is nearly black by the time he pulls away. Your chest feels caved in, your breath a reedy whine through your damaged throat. You barely know which way is up. You lie limp in his arms before he drops you on the floor.

“Stop,” he begs.

He’s hiding his face in his hands. You think he might be crying. You have to fix it. You try to speak, but it comes out as a wet groan. He shakes his head anyway.

“Don’t cry,” you manage at last, voice hoarse.

You pull yourself across the deck. Crawl between his thighs, drag your face against his stomach, the front of his pants, open-mouthed, panting and lightheaded from your empty lungs. You can’t stop shaking. “Please. I’ll do anything if you’d…”

Finally he shoves you down. You’re sure he’s going to kill you now for murdering his precious Akechi before he kisses you again, straddles your waist and pins you to the floor when you try to touch him back. He nearly breaks your jacket pulling it off and shoves your shirt up to your armpits painfully high. When you try to speak, his gloved hand pins you to the floor by your hair, wrenching your head up like he means to snap it off your neck. His breath is hot on your skin, lips tracing your sternum not quite in kisses. His fingers pinch your nipple like he’s convinced it isn’t real until you scream, until he covers your mouth with one hand.

“For the last time,” he whispers, “ _shut up_.”

You do that. You keep your mouth shut and try to hold yourself as still as you can as he unbuttons your pants, so he can take what he wants. You were born for being used, and you were always good at it. You still are. When it starts to hurt, you barely whimper at all.


	4. Chapter 4

You are Goro Akechi, and your clothes are scattered across the steps of the captain’s Diet building while your lover’s sweat (and other fluids) dries on your skin. The permanent daytime is cooler in the shade of the building’s front pillars. With only your underwear on for modesty, you tuck his fully clothed body between your bare legs, shiver at his bare arms around your waist. The hollow of his eyes fits against the curve of your neck. The scent of his hair in the rotting ocean air makes your eyes close.

You can’t help yourself; driven by some instinct you’ve never had before, you lean your cheek against the top of his head and breathe him in deep. “There’s bedrooms inside the ship,” you murmur.

His eyelashes open slowly against the skin of your shoulder. “Rooms specially for this,” you go on quietly. The captain knows how his guests like their entertainment. “There’s supplies. A real mattress.” So your back doesn’t have to get turned into grated meat against the Diet’s stone steps. Unless he’s into that, or into doing it outside; then here is fine. Anything Joker wants is fine.

“I should leave,” he says, and begins to push himself away.

You panic instantly. Your legs lock around his back like a vice. “No!”

“ _Get off me_ ,” he hisses, despite the fact that he is, technically, on top of you rather than the other way around. The tears long since dried on your face, but you can feel them welling up again with desperation. You grab his face, press your mouth to his again and again so he can’t get the words out. He pulls away anyway. “What’s _wrong_ with you?!”

“I love—”

“Stop saying that!”

Heartbroken, now too cold without him, you curl up on yourself, shriveling with a misery in your heart that threatens to devour you from the inside. “You don’t act anything like him,” Joker goes on in disbelief. “You don’t even sound like him. You’re nothing like him.”

“I _am_ Goro Akechi,” your voice insists weakly.

Joker laughs. The mocking edge to it makes you want to die. “You’re not. I know so because I love Goro and I don’t want _anything_ to do with you.”

You have never wanted to be someone else so much before. You wish you could take your face and skin and scoop out all the wrong parts from the inside. You’d let Joker rummage through what makes you who you are and throw away all the bits he didn’t like. You are Goro Akechi but you don’t know what that means, like the definition of the word got lost in translation, and you’d give anything to pare yourself down to the original.

You struggle to hold back tears, face buried in your knees and trying hard to become very small, until Joker swears under his breath. He reaches out to brush a spot where your skin had been rubbed raw against the concrete. Immediately, you melt under even this barest sign of affection and sigh.

“Did it hurt?” he asks.

You wipe your face. “It doesn’t matter if it hurt or not,” you say adoringly, and you mean it. Love is a bright light in your chest and you are translucent with it. You’d train yourself to get off on anything he gave you. Unless he didn’t want you to get off, of course; you’d train yourself to like that too.

He comes closer, until your raw back is pressed against the stone again. You can’t suppress your flinch.

“That looked like it hurt,” he said.

You sense the right answer is yes. You nod.

His fingers trace the bruises he’s left. He digs in unpleasantly, pain blooming deeper in your body. You stifle a cry. “You should die for what you did.”

You nod shakily. This is true if Joker says so.

“I bet Goro would want me to kill you. He deserves justice.”

You keep nodding. “Anything you want. I-If you want me to do it myself, I can.”

“You’d just roll over and let me kill you,” says Joker, like this is a bad thing.

“If you want to do it yourself, I can pretend to resist. I’ll make it look real.”

Joker studies you. “You’d really let me do anything.”

“I could never tell you no,” you say. Literally, you think—you are not sure that you’re capable of it, thanks to the captain’s cognition.

“You’re so annoying,” says Joker.

You are instantly devastated. You don’t know what you did wrong. There’s a look of genuine hatred on his face, and in that second you know that you’d do anything to be exactly who he wants. You’ll become exactly the Goro Akechi he lost, replace yourself from the inside out until he is rebuilt perfectly, down to his very face and soul. You would kill anyone for Joker. Including yourself.

You blurt out: “I’ll fix the door to the captain’s sanctuary! I won’t rest until I’ve found something—another letter, a different way in…”

Joker, suddenly, reaches for your throat, just as you realize you’ve promised something that you physically can’t do—there is no key, and you could not betray the captain if there was one. You tilt your head back. His hand curls softly around the back, cradled your head and pulls you close—

A girl shrieks. Joker yelps, scrambles away from you, and throws his leather jacket over you like you’re a corpse to be hidden. “ _Noir_?!”

“Ididn’tmeantoI’msosorryIjustthoughtmaybeyouwereintroublebut UM! I’ll come back later! Very sorry! I didn’t mean to! Very so sorry—"

There’s the sound of running footsteps. You pull Joker’s coat down until you can peer around the pillar, watch the thief with the feathered hat practically sprint for the entrance to the other reality.

“Oh my god,” Joker says.

Slowly, you pull Joker’s coat to your nose and inhale his scent deeply. When you lick, the taste of him lingers on the leather collar.

*

Even when Joker manages to calm her down, Noir won’t go anywhere near you. Probably because even with all your clothes on, you’ve very obviously been up to… activities.

Women are always playing squeamish and stupid about sex. Not your business if she can’t handle Joker’s marks on you.

She stops talking the second you come into view. Joker gives you a look, like he wants you to go away, but Noir says before he can: “I, er, see Shido’s cognition of Akechi-kun really has changed after all, hasn’t it?”

Joker nods. Noir gives him an extremely dubious look for having obviously come here alone to, ah, _personally_ _experience_ how much you’ve changed. “So it really worked? Shido thinks that Akechi betrayed him?”

“Hm,” says Joker.

“You’ll help us open the door to Shido’s sanctuary?” Noir asks, addressing you with unnerving plaintiveness.

Is that what they were trying to do? Ah, you get it now—you’re a cognitive creation, and they assumed that since you were able to break the door, you’d know something special about the captain’s palace that would enable you to fix it. So they changed the captain’s cognition, somehow, in an attempt to make the captain believe Goro Akechi is capable of betraying him.

Joker might be disappointed to learn that there is no force on this earth that would make you betray the captain or make the captain think that you were capable of betrayal. You keep it to yourself. You’ll bend yourself into whatever shapes it takes for Joker to love you back.

“I promised Joker that I would do anything for him,” you say.

“Oh my gosh,” says Noir, terrified and shocked both at once. Hilarious how women wilt at the first sign of the unexpected. “Oh, god. I really thought that maybe we’d done that entire change in his cognition for nothing, and… Oh, that’s such a relief to know that it actually worked—with the election coming up, and…”

“Who knows,” says Joker without expression. “For all we know, it’s lying through its teeth.”

You are heartbroken instantly. Why doesn’t he believe you? What more does he want before he’ll love you? “It’s unclear if we can ever really trust something like that,” Joker goes on. “It’s already done terrible things before.”

What are you doing _wrong_? When will Joker give you his attention, his affection? “I don’t think it works like that,” Noir says, before you can start begging again. “Past actions for a cognition don’t necessarily have anything to do with how the cognition is formed currently, right? If Shido thinks of Akechi in a particular way _now_ , then that has nothing to do with what he thought of him before—”

“I meant _anything_ ,” you interrupt desperately. “I would give you the whole world if you asked. Why won’t you believe me?”

Noir covers her mouth.

“No price is too high. Will you love me if I open the door? I’ll get on it right away, I will—”

“Stop talking,” says Joker. You stop talking. “Just ignore it, Noir. It acts like that now.”

“Oh,” says Noir, for some reason. Stinging from Joker’s rejection, you avoid her eyes altogether. “Um… in that case, maybe it would be best to return to the other reality, so we can discuss next steps?”

“I’ll handle the next steps,” you say. “I caused this problem for Joker. I’ll take responsibility and fix it.”

You look hopefully at Joker, but he just looks increasingly irritated that you didn’t follow his instructions. You shut your mouth again.

“O-Oh,” says Noir again, seemingly incapable of saying anything else. Funny how even real girls prove the captain’s cognitions of female intelligence right. “Well… Joker, I still think that you should come back to the other reality anyway. Mona-chan was very worried about you, you know… We all were.”

“The Metaverse is relatively safe at this strength. I could handle my own even if I did get caught.”

Noir looks unhappy. “Well, yes, but… considering latest events, and how you seemed when we… found…”

She seems to struggle to get the words out. Joker does not help. She fidgets. Surprisingly shy, for someone gutsy enough to be a Phantom Thief. She keeps looking at you, avoiding your stare. “We didn’t think that you should be alone, but…”

Is Joker refusing to leave the Metaverse? Is he _willingly_ spending time with you? For what? To finish the murder from before he was interrupted? Has he changed his mind and he actually does love you? You’d settle for him just wanting to use you for your face and body; you’d settle for literally anything he gives you.

“Um,” she says, in a very tiny voice. “Sorry, but this is a… bit of a private conversation.”

You are absolutely not leaving Joker unless he explicitly asks you. “Considering latest events, I don’t believe that Joker should be alone,” you reply blandly.

Now she looks even more uncomfortable, but Noir doesn’t seem to have the spine to say anything to your face. You bite your tongue, wonder why Joker has surrounded himself with such incompetent, cowardly people. How can he achieve true power as a notorious team of Phantom Thieves if his team is like _this_?

“…Alright,” she says at last. She looks down and fiddles with her fingers. “We just want to be there for you, Joker.”

“I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

She glances at you again, but her words are directed at Joker: “Please don’t enter the Metaverse without us again. It’s not… safe.”

Your eyes narrow. You can hear a double meaning when you hear it—she doesn’t have any real problem with Joker entering the Metaverse alone; she has a problem with him entering the Metaverse to meet _you_ without supervision. She wants the Phantom Thieves to act like a—a chaperone at a school dance, preventing Joker from being with you the way he wants.

She’s getting in his way. She thinks that she can just walk in here and tell him what to do—tell him that he shouldn’t see you, that you’re dangerous when all you’ve _ever_ wanted was his happiness and to do his will—

“I’m available after school all days this week, if you want to talk,” she says. “I told the company that it was personal matters.”

“Can you do that?” Joker says.

“Everyone has been more than generous with me in allowing me the time to grieve,” she says. She tucks a bit of hair behind her ear shyly. “I thought… I know that it’s hard, and… and I know how much you helped me when my father died, and how important it was to have time to myself…”

There’s a long, lingering silence, in which Noir obviously expects Joker to say something nice and agreeable, and he doesn’t say anything at all.

“Please, Joker. We don’t have to be in the Palace every day. The election date is still some time from now. In fact—” She blinks, an idea occurring to her on the spot. “In fact, you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be.”

 _What_?

Noir looks enthused with her own idea. Joker, at least, looks a bit like the idea simply never occurred to him. “I’m sure that this place must be painful for you. If you want, you’d never have to come here again. The rest of the Phantom Thieves could just finish the rest of the palace on our own. I’m sure that Queen would be an excellent battle strategist, and…”

_She’s trying to separate you from him._

“Do you really think the Phantom Thieves wouldn’t fall apart without him?” you say haughtily.

Noir nearly jumps out of her skin, like a household pet has suddenly began to speak.

Joker doesn’t even look at you. It might be permission to speak. You barrel on before he can change his mind: “I’ve seen the way your team works. Let alone Joker’s ability to switch Personas and cover any weaknesses or deficiencies in the current line-up, the entire team dynamic would fall apart without him. He balances personalities, not just Personas. It is evident that each of you trust him on a personal level, in a way unlike anyone else on the team. He’s the most experienced at providing support while also organizing three other people at once in the thick of chaotic battle. Do you think all that is simply picked up overnight?”

To your surprise, instead of simply rolling over like the shy little girl she’d presented herself as so far, she takes a moment of silence, and then replies: “The Phantom Thieves wouldn’t endanger one of its own members for the sake of a mission. Not if it can’t be mitigated. If the Thieves can take Shido’s heart without him, and if it would save Joker heartache, then we’ll do it.”

“By your own logic the idea is faulty. Removing Joker from the team endangers everyone else.”

Joker tilts his head.

“Training is easy and free in Mementos,” Noir says, with a _very_ even tone you did not expect. “Any mishaps can be worked out in a safe trial area. At the very least, the idea is worth trying out. Queen could take charge for one or two Mementos runs as a trial.”

“And you have the time to spare to rebuild an entire team dynamic without Joker?” you scoff.

“Yes. Provided that everyone else clears their schedules. Which they would, if it was for a teammate.”

The very _idea_ that someone would ever dare to have a dedication to Joker even a _fraction_ as decent as yours gives you half a mind to pop her eyes out of her head with your thumbs, just as Joker says, “The decision would also have to be made unanimously. We’d have to run it by everyone else, first. Personally, I appreciate it, Noir, but I’m fine.”

Noir gives him a significant look. Looks at you. Looks at him.

“And it’s not like it’s comparable to your father, anyway,” Joker says, a little chagrined. You would have _never_ in a million years suspected that the leader of the Phantom Thieves was capable of _chagrin_. “I only knew Akechi for a couple months. Okum… er, the man was your father, and you knew him your whole life. I appreciate your concern, but… don’t worry.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” says Noir in a _studiously_ neutral tone, “but I am not sure that… this… is ‘doing okay’.”

You’re going to kill her. First she questions Joker’s authority, now she insults what he does with you. It’s not her fucking _business_ to decide what Joker is allowed or now allowed to do. How dare she judge what he does with you? When you’d bend yourself in half to be of use to him?

You realize you were stepping forward when Joker stops you. Noir backs away quickly. “Can we talk about this later,” Joker says without asking, which is more appropriate of his station, to give the orders and commands that he is due as their leader. For _once_ , Noir isn’t an irritating excuse for a wench and nods quickly, backs away until she steps through the pathway to the other reality and disappears altogether. You hold her gaze until the second she vanishes.

Then you round on him. “You’re just going to let her boss you around?”

“ _Don’t_ threaten my friends,” he snaps.

You step back as if struck. You _feel_ like he hit you. Your entire body cowers. You realize that you are apologizing when Joker starts walking away. “Wait! Joker, please, I really didn’t mean—I would never go against you, I would never defy your decisions, I swear—”

“ _Shut up_ ,” he says. You make yourself very small and do as he says.

Joker keeps rubbing at his face, running his hands through his hair anxiously. He looks distressed, but you can’t do anything to relieve it, so you just hover until he leans against the deck railing. You sit along the ground, scoot until you’re sitting at his feet, looking up towards his face. He’s giving you that disgusted look again, so you look away, try to think of what you’re doing wrong.

“Look,” says Joker. “She has a point.”

He doesn’t mention her idea to use Queen—whoever that is—to replace him as team leader and remove him from the lineup. “It doesn’t matter if she’s right. You are the leader. Your decisions are absolute.”

Joker frowns. You shouldn’t have disagreed with him. “They’re not. She has a mind of her own. She joined the Thieves for her own reasons. If she started to disagree with the group’s decisions, it would be her right to leave. Or make _me_ leave.”

“Insubordination isn’t a _right_ ,” you say, shocked.

“It’s her right to think for herself.”

 _It is not_ , you want to snarl. Joker goes on: “And if I ever made the wrong decisions, I’d rather have someone tell me.”

“You would let them betray you,” you say in horror.

“If I did something worth betraying. Yeah.”

You are sick with dread.

Joker’s love for his teammates has made him soft. The very idea that he would _invite_ being stabbed in the back, should his teammates decide they want nothing else to do with him—god, it’s only a matter of time before one of them decides they don’t have any more use for him, or that there’s a better _winning side_ somewhere else, and they throw him away. Doesn’t he _see_ that his kindness exposes his back to the knife? Does he expect _trust_ to hold a team of _criminals_ together in harmony?

“I would never betray you,” you say forcefully. (This is not true, but it’s almost true and it’s what Joker needs to hear.)

He ignores this.

“You can trust me, Joker. I’ll prove it to you; I’ll get the door open, I’ll fix everything…”

His lip curls into a sneer.

You want to throw yourself off the ship railing and drown.

You must do better. You would never allow the other Thieves to touch him. Even if Joker will not defend himself, you will become the sword and shield to keep him safe. You know how conspiracies work. You know it’s only a matter of time before someone starts thinking they’re clever, begins to test his authority, prods for his weaknesses.

As it is, it looks like Noir’s already started on the road to betrayal. The weak links are emerging.

You must be ready.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a long silence between Noir’s departure and Joker’s decision, but when it happens, it’s swift and curt: “I’m leaving,” says Joker, and turns hard on his heel.

“Wait!” you say. “Didn’t you change the captain’s cognition of me to be able to get through the door?”

He made you like this in the first place, and yet when Joker looks at you, he seems… guarded. A little chagrined at his own actions, which is always unhelpful because then it means they’re resistant to manipulation. Weird, how shame is enough to make someone dig their heels in; your strongest asset to the captain was always malleability, shameless ability to whore yourself out to his agenda, and a complete lack of boundaries.

“I’m not doing this right now,” Joker replies.

“But—the door! The letter! Weren’t you supposed to stay to—”

“If I need something from you,” says Joker over his shoulder, “I will let you know.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?!”

“Not my business,” says Joker, like he isn’t the one who personally went into the captain’s mind and made you the way you are, like he has no interest whatsoever in the person who—the person who’s the _closest he’s ever going to fucking get_ to Goro Akechi. You cannot _believe_ you are right here and he’d just turn his nose up at you, even though you completely can, because the captain also had no interest in what you did during your free time.

Your mind is made up. It doesn’t matter that you are not capable of betraying the captain. You have to do whatever it takes to make Joker love you back. You’ll figure something out in the in-between.

Anything is fair game; you don’t have time to debate about the merits of honesty or dishonesty when acquiring Joker’s attention is the same importance of gnawing your own limb off to escape a steel trap. You must have his attention. Joker’s love will solve all these new wounds in your cognitive make-up. Everything will be alright when Joker loves you back. You’ll go to any length to make that happen. 

“Wait,” you say again. At his obvious irritation, you duck your head. “Just… one second.”

You get your gun and your clothes and the earpiece you barely wear and the little radio you’ve never used because you aren’t actually an official part of the security team under the captain’s consideration. You hide the radio behind a pillar in front of the Diet building. Hopefully, if it’s found by a passing shadow, it’ll think that it was simply dropped by another member of the security team. Even if the radio is found, it’s not like it connects anywhere incriminating; it’s not like it’s illegal for the security team to contact you when your entire job is to help keep the captain’s palace secure.

You explain this system to him while he leans against the railing, which he seems oddly attached to. You wonder if some part of him is trying to become closer to the ocean where he dumped Akechi’s body, or if he knows somehow that you killed him on this deck next to this very railing. It doesn’t matter—his weaknesses or strengths are of no concern to you now. He could turn into a completely different person and you would have no opinion. Your captain has made you well.

“You really mean it when you said you’d find another way for us,” says Joker, when you finish talking.

No, but Joker will not love you if you admit that, for all his attempts to change the captain’s cognition, you are still not capable of actually betraying the captain. “Of course,” you say instead. “I meant everything I said. Unless you feel strongly otherwise, I intend to work on it immediately, without rest until it’s done.”

But Joker just looks mildly irritated.

Is he surprised by your initiative? You might not have ever been a threat to the captain in terms of intellect, but you were hardly ever bad at what was asked of you, and that meant being—as they say—a self-starter. Should you be more stupid? Maybe the captain has overestimated Akechi’s intelligence and Joker is unhappy with the disparity. You bite your lip. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, he’s never satisfied with you. What will it take? What do you need to do, what do you need to be?

“You know, for a second…” Joker says suddenly, “when you arguing with Noir… I didn’t know that you could sound like such an argumentative know-it-all.”

He’s staring out at the ocean again through the ship’s railings. After a moment, Joker frowns. “You sounded just like…”

But even when you wait, he doesn’t finish his sentence. Joker studies you. “You’re really going to help us? Even though that means that if we take Shido’s heart, the palace will collapse?”

“Of course.” It’s what Joker wants.

“That means that you’ll disappear.”

“Of course.” You were meant to disappear when Shido’s election plans completed as well.

“You’re so agreeable.”

“Anything you want,” you say again.

Somehow, this makes Joker _less_ pleased. "Will it hurt when the Palace disappears?"

Why? Does he want it to hurt? “Does it hurt when humans die?" you reply.

"I…” Joker thinks about it. "…Probably. Depends on how it happened. But we're made of physical things. You’re not real."

"And it doesn't hurt when you're hit in the Metaverse. I suppose that this," you point at Joker's lapels, "doesn't have weight, and doesn't feel like leather. I suppose your Persona isn't real."

"Arsène isn’t a cognition. He’s a Persona.”

Is that his Persona’s name? "Arsène is a cognitive creation," you reply. "Like anything else. Like reality, or gods, or happiness or sadness or love, or even death. You know that you have to imagine death, don't you? You have to make it real, _cognitively_ , or else the person doesn't really _die_. The physical processes of someone who died across the world doesn't become _real_ until his wife hears about it on the phone.”

Or until his wife finds the body in a freezer, but you don’t think he would appreciate that comment. He looks irritated as it is. “Death is death whether or not anyone knows about it. The body stops working. It’s a fact regardless about who knows of it.”

You shake your head. “You’ve misunderstood. All things are part fact, part cognition. This building—” you gesture to the Diet building “—is part reality, and part of the captain’s will. Death is biological fact, and part whatever terms we come to when we grieve. Gods are characters we made up and handed power to, but this does not make their power false. Do gods die? Did philosophers not declare god dead for decades? Reality is a series of myths that are true—do people not mourn their shattered cognitive realities every day, despite the fact that objective realities exist? Things that are technically not _real_ die all the time."

Joker crosses his arms, but he doesn’t look angry. A little intrigued, if anything. Even hopeful. “I didn’t know you were into philosophy.”

“The captain does not consider me brainless.”

“Are you going to quote Hegel at me next?”

You frown. “What’s Hegel?”

Joker squares his jaw. Closes his eyes.

"So you're not real," says Joker.

"I am," you say, a little frustrated. "I just said so.”

"You said that you can die," Joker says. "And that it'll hurt."

You stand. “I will investigate the sanctuary until further notice. Please return when convenient for you,” you say instead of responding, as if declaring the previous topic so obvious it's not worth discussing.

The truth is that you don't actually know.


	6. Chapter 6

People are hard to please, but doing tasks for them to make them happy is easy. The captain was always that way. You hope Joker is, too. You can’t wait for him to love you—even a little bit. You’d take anything he’s willing to give you.

The captain’s sanctuary is utterly secure, of course. The walls around it are impassable and sustain no damage. The lock cannot be picked. There are no waiters, servants, secretaries, or whores who enter the place for any reason. It is his unassailable bastion, his refuge and right, and its security is blessed and overseen by the five patrons of his operation.

This is, of course, a good thing.

Joker will only love you if he believes that you really are loyal to him and only him, and that you really meant it when you said you’d do anything—but betraying the captain or of endangering him in any way doesn’t qualify as “anything.” It qualifies as a nonexistent concept. The fact that the captain’s sanctuary remains impenetrable means a type of freedom, because now it means you are free to tell Joker whatever Joker wants to hear.

Maybe you can find a false lead? Something that _looks_ convincing, or at least convinces Joker that you are working yourself to the bone for his sake, and finally endears him to you. If Joker is convinced there’s another way, then he might take any unusual story that you give him.

The key isn’t whether or not the story makes sense. It’s whether or not the story makes him like you. Like any other identity or face to wear, you suppose.

*

There’s nowhere better to start with the desire to make someone like you than the main floor.

It has the bars and the drinks, where cognitions are at a constant state of mildly-pleasant buzz, endearing everyone to each other in an endless feedback loop of affection. It is also one of the easiest places for you to socialize, because already have instructions on how to behave here: simpering, precociously intelligent, but not anymore intelligent than anyone more important than you. A nice armpiece for the captain’s crew. Also, you are physically incapable of not smiling when on this floor.

You can see shadow guards in the corner of your eye when you enter. When you head down the stairs, they follow. They’re obviously present to watch your movements. Something Joker had done in the other reality must have told him that Akechi wasn’t _completely_ loyal—that he had some kind of connection to Joker that might have made the captain cautious.

Which begs the better question of why nobody’s tried to throw you off the ship yet. That’s usually what happens to people Shido thinks are going to betray him.

It takes a good ten minutes of circulating before you find just the man who’d know some answers: Tenji Arai, alone at one of the bars, technically a lowly secretary (“executive assistant”) to the director of the transportation department, who, by default, knows everything there is to know about the entire department by virtue of the fact that everything comes through his desk and nobody thinks secretaries have real brains. He’s on this ship because he made a name for himself in the same incident that you know him from, actually. He sold out the specifics of the subway’s corrosion, lack of repair and maintenance, and the scant paper trail that incriminated the department director, allowing the captain’s lawyers to put the final nail in the director’s career’s coffin a mere month after Akechi had caused the publicized subway accident in April. A coordinated assault from many angles. Arai’s contribution wasn’t exactly _central_ , but undoubtedly incredibly valuable. He’s been a mole in that department ever since, ensuring that the department director’s replacement was the captain’s man and securing yet another piece of the fractured government for the captain’s control.

Sometimes all it takes is one person switching sides to tip the scales.

If there’s anyone that the captain might think of as someone who knows more than he should, it’d probably be a male secretary like Arai. You sit at the bar next to him. You’re not allowed to be where the alcohol is by technicality, but obviously there’s no real laws here, and your alcohol tolerance is whatever the captain believes it to be, so it’s not actually that bad.

“Arai-san,” you say. The voice out of your mouth comes out higher-pitched and nauseatingly cute. “It’s been a while since we last saw each other, hasn’t it?”

He seems surprised. Excessively surprised, for someone just meeting a very old acquaintance. “Akechi! The prodigal son returns, hm?”

You give an interview laugh. “Prodigal?”

“Sure. Your infamy has made things lively around here, ever since you let a Phantom Thief fuck you.”

Oh.

You realize, belatedly, that you never actually figured out _what_ Joker did to change the captain’s cognition of Akechi so badly that you became like this. It hadn’t seemed important when Joker was around, like his very presence made you literally stupid.

Great. Reduced mental faculties and a bad reputation. Also, because the captain has apparently spent time thinking about Akechi being a faggot and also Akechi’s sex life, you’re now presumably a limp-wristed homosexual, and theoretically have now obtained a real sex drive, to make you even stupider when horny.

Wait, is this why you’re so stupid around Joker?

He pours you a shot, entirely ignoring the bartender. “Hope pissing off the captain was worth it,” he says, like an inside joke. You’re ninety percent sure that this cognition is not aware that you aren’t going to survive the election, otherwise you’d make a joke about being here for a good time, not a long time. Oh, that’s another new development, considering you didn’t have a sense of humor before.

So now you’re stupid, a known whore, gay, horny, _and_ you have a sense of humor. By god, it’s almost like you have a real personality.

“Oh, don’t look so glum, hm?” says Arai. You snap out of it, put your interview smile back on, as required of someone allowed in the grace and company of the captain’s chosen men. “You killed the leader of the Phantom Thieves, so obviously, no matter what you’ve done—or who you’ve done, aha—obviously your loyalty is still with the captain. No harm, no foul, hm?”

So _that’s_ why you haven’t been thrown off the ship. The captain is still convinced that Joker is dead. He must have assumed that, despite having had illicit affairs with the thief, you still pulled through and killed him anyway.

You don’t wonder why it is that the captain does not think of you as someone who might know these facts about him, or why it is that you’re having to play scavenger-hunt with the pieces of your identity. He must not have considered it important for you to be self-aware. You don’t wonder if perhaps it is doing damage to your make-up for you to learn other facts, like Joker’s survival or how you interact with humans that aren’t cognitions. Was your make-up ever meant to be in meaningful contact with a real person who wasn’t under the captain’s control?

Either way: What you learn through isn’t necessarily what the captain becomes consciously aware of. You know that Akechi is dead, while the captain doesn’t; in the same way, you know that Joker is alive, while the captain doesn’t.

Your interview smile is leaden on your eyes; you never got the hang of making the eyes smile with the mouth, even though you know that’s the trick to a convincing false smile. You do not wonder why the captain makes your face like this. Truly some limits of cognitive beings were not meant to be pushed. What a shame that you have no say in this matter and no option to return to your previous cognitive state.

You down the alcohol Arai poured for you. “Precisely,” you say, when the alcohol burn has passed. “It was just a bit of fun. He had a pretty face and it was a shame not to take advantage before he died.”

Arai quickly refills your shot glass. “You sure are a brutal one, aren’t you, Akechi, hm? I don’t know if I would have had it in me to kill a woman I’d slept with. At least not face to face, hm? Suppose I’d just ask you to murder her for me, aha.”

“All requests go through the captain,” you say automatically. “And it’s not hard when you know most people don’t deserve to live at all, let alone in our new country.”

“Ah, you’re right. The captain’s vision of country’s future is worth any price.”

You down the second shot obediently. You can’t refuse alcohol without irritating the captain’s business partners, so you don’t. “Perhaps you can help me, then,” you say, before he can do something else you can’t refuse. “I desperately want to apologize to the captain for my indiscretion.”

“Now, I can’t imagine he’s _too_ upset if you’re still here. You did get the job done, after all.”

“Still. I’d like to clear the air. I’m sure you can understand wanting to be in our captain’s good graces.”

Arai thinks on that. He’s a fairly young person himself—he can’t be more than thirty-five, early enough in his career that his future hinges on the good grace of older patrons. You are very sure that the captain is aware of this, because he keeps young businessmen in his circles precisely because this makes them easy to control. In theory, you should be able to leverage the same aspect of the captain’s cognition of Arai.

“I certainly do, Akechi-kun. But I’m sorry to say, nobody goes in or out of the captain’s sanctuary.”

“I’m sure that there’s _some_ way,” you say. “Perhaps he could come out? For me?”

Arai laughs. “For you? Sorry, he wouldn’t come out for literal royalty. There’s a _literal_ prince on this ship, hm?”

You tap your shot glass on the wooden bartop. If the sudden influx of prince metaphors is because of Akechi’s parentage—well, you don’t have an opinion on that, because that would be inconvenient for the captain. But it’s getting a bit much.

You’re not looking for a legitimate way into the sanctuary, since it can’t be done, but you’d think Arai would have at least a _rumor_. Something that sounds feasibly legitimate, so that you can hand it off to Joker. This shouldn’t be this goddamn difficult; all you want is for Joker to give you the fucking time of day; it’s not like you’re asking for his hand in marriage, although maybe you’d accept that too, since it doesn’t matter what he gives you so long as he gives you _something_ —you just need _anything_ at all to prove your worth and your loyalty and your love to Joker and then maybe…

“Hey, what’s the rush?” says Arai. You stop tapping your shot glass. “You don’t have anything to fear so long as you’re on the captain’s ship.”

You don’t _fear_ , except when it’s to fear disappointing Joker. You hold out your shot glass for another drink, and Arai obliges you eagerly. You’re probably reaching your limit for how much you can have in such a short period of time; you know the captain has seen Akechi drunk a few times, and you know that the captain keeps careful stock of how much each and every one of his conspiracy members can drink before their tongues come loose.

“Oh, I see,” says Arai, amused. “You really can’t go two seconds without having the captain’s attention all to yourself.”

Your head whips around. “What?”

“You’re so desperate for the captain’s affection that you couldn’t even betray him properly for someone else,” says Arai with a sudden factual tone to his voice. “You wanted to play both sides and reap both of the rewards, hm? You couldn’t stand the idea of not having someone’s attention for more than two seconds.”

 _That_ takes you aback, even though you’re not entirely sure why. You’re a cognition of the captain’s mind; you don’t even know where all these new experiences are coming from because, technically, your entire self and personality is generated by the captain, who also generates Arai. Why are you surprised by what Arai says?

“Honestly,” says Arai. “What made you think that the captain would ever _really_ want anything to do with you?”

You could _throttle_ him. “I don’t _want_ the captain to want me. I exist only to fulfill his plans. I am here for his use. My feelings on any matter are irrelevant.”

“Really? You just thought it’d be fun to whore around with a Phantom Thief behind the captain’s back? Jeopardize the entire operation because you _don’t want anything_?” He comes closer. For some reason, you don’t pull away.

“I’m just a tool for the captain to use,” you say automatically. “I exist for him.”

“You’re a fucking liar, Akechi,” says Arai. “You lied to the captain.”

“No!” you say, nearly bolting out of your seat in panic. “I would never! I live to serve—"

“What would it cost for you to suck my dick, hm?” Arai asks.

You freeze.

“Since you’re whoring around with Phantom Thieves and all. Letting practically anyone fuck you. What’s the draw, hm, Akechi? What’s your price? Do you charge cash, or do you let people have you if they’d just put good word in for you with the captain?”

 _That’s_ not Arai. The real Arai is a known prude of the evangelist sort, so much so that Akechi had complained about it after working with him on the subway incident. Arai doesn’t believe in sex _after_ marriage, let alone before. The _captain_ knows Arai is a prude. What the fuck is this about? The very idea that Arai would try to pick up a kid after a five minute conversation—the very idea that Arai thinks you’d just throw yourself at someone you met twice—

But your brain has turned into cotton. You try to speak, but it’s like being under heavy anesthetic. When he leans closer, your jaw goes slack.

“What if I promise to be nice to you? Is that all it takes for you to let someone fuck you? Would you like that? Just someone to make you feel _special_ for a change? Let you be the media darling child star, center of attention on my dick?”

You can’t speak.

“Giving you the goddamn time of day and a pretty compliment is all it costs to fuck your needy, desperate mouth?”

You have the sudden impulse to crawl into his lap. Arai isn’t even _good looking_ , a part of your brain thinks.

“I guess pillow-biters like you aren’t picky about who they let fuck them,” says Arai.

Dazed, you nod.

“Heard from the captain your mother was the same way. Throwing herself at the first goddamn person who looked at her nicely.”

Arai reaches for your face, rubs gently along your cheek—softly, almost kindly, like he really likes you. You would die for Arai.

“Is that what the whole Phantom Thief affair was about? Hm? You couldn’t go two days without needing someone’s fucking attention? Needed it so badly you’d bend over and let a criminal fuck you in the ass?”

You nod again.

“No self-respect,” says Arai. “Not even half a brain. No spine, no real plan, just drifting around, hoping someone will like you enough to use you for their vision. You’re just a dirty animal wallowing in whatever filth other people will give you if you think it’ll make them give a damn about you. I bet you’d even suck your father’s dick just for two seconds of feeling loved.”

“Captain,” you whimper, and Arai pulls away.

“Just kidding, aha,” says Arai with a cheerful laugh. “Sorry. Was just having a bit of fun. I don’t really want anything to do with you, and I don’t think the captain does, either.”

He stands up. You fall over yourself to grab him and you don’t even know why; you hate his stupid _hmm_ noises and his supremely average face and the cracks in the cognition where the personality warped and you will explode into a million pieces if you don’t suck his dick at least once, feel his touch soft against you, maybe listen to him say one or two nice words about how good you are. “Disgusting,” says Arai, and you realize you’ve been saying all that aloud. “Don’t touch me.”

You need the captain.

“Don’t bother trying to make amends with the captain.”

You need Joker.

Arai laughs. “Shame you killed the thief, hm?”

You can’t believe you’re so awful that nobody even wants to use you.

“Well! I’m sure someone out there would be willing to take advantage of you,” says Arai, and claps you on the back. “Just a matter of finding someone just as desperate as you, hm?”

The touch of skin burns. You curl up on the barstool, trying not to pant so loud that other people notice. You are covered in sweat and you’re achingly hard when you hadn’t even gotten it up when Joker had been fucking you, and you don’t understand what’s happening at all, like you’re possessed by this strange new cognition that you don’t understand and for a second you want nothing else but to cut the thing between your legs off just to get rid of this ghost that makes you drool over strange men like the worst homosexual cliché. For the first time, it’s a relief to know that you’ll be dead soon.


	7. Chapter 7

After Arai, the investigation does not improve.

The cognitions have a surprisingly unanimous opinion of you, to say the very least.

*

By the time the radio call comes on your headpiece, the very idea of seeing Joker again is an immediate balm on your heart. You do not want to think about Arai anymore. You don’t want to think about any of the other cognitions you’ve met since. You don’t want to think about the captain. You can’t wait to descend into the peaceful bliss of following Joker’s direct orders, thinking of only what he wants from you. Even his anger at you for not finding anything useful would be a relief.

But it’s Noir and the skinny fox kid who’re standing at the entrance.

“Where’s Joker,” you say immediately.

“Joker isn’t coming today,” Noir replies. Stilted, like she rehearsed it. The fox boy just stands there with an incredibly steady ease that makes you instantly on guard.

“Then why are _you_ here?”

If she doesn’t like your tone, she does a remarkable job of hiding it. “He asked me to check on you and how your progress is going. We heard that you’re going to help us steal the palace ruler’s treasure, so…” She nods, slightly. “I look forward to working with you.”

You doubt it. Your bet is that for all her insistence that he avoid you, she still wasn’t able to convince him to not be interested in your progress. The way she was talking before—the way she said that he had to tell her to check on you—you’re betting that she persists in being snippy and resisting his authority. You don’t want anything to do with her.

You don’t ask why the fox guy is here. He’s obviously the muscle to keep the lady safe while she does the talking. Looks a little skinny to be the muscle, but you _did_ see him how effective he is with his sword.

“If he’s so interested, I’ll speak with him directly,” you tell Noir.

“He’s busy today,” she says politely.

You’re not telling her anything about this disaster of an investigation. “It’s for Joker’s eyes only.”

“I can tell him that,” says Noir. You get the distinct impression that she won’t. “Er… we were hoping for a little more information…”

“Is it true, then?” asks the fox boy with an oddly childlike earnestness. “That the palace puzzle is now unsolvable, and we simply cannot progress?”

“Fox,” says Noir, with a note of despair in her voice.

Fox seems perplexed by her reaction. “Hm? I think Joker would appreciate our earnestness. And the cognitive Akechi _did_ seem very sure of himself when he explained the situation in the freezer.”

 _Fuck_ , you don’t need him reminding you that this entire problem is your fault. You _also_ wonder if he intentionally mentioned what Joker would prefer knowing how much _you_ value Joker’s opinion, or if he himself just happens to hold Joker’s opinion in high esteem. You stand at attention on reflex.

“It’s not an impossible situation. It’s just that cognitions in the palace have become… significantly more resistant to me,” you say, grudgingly. Which is not to say that you were particularly adored by the captain’s inner ring before, but it wasn’t like… how it is now. “I am… still seeking an alternative route into the sanctuary. The door remains unchanged.”

“Charming,” says Fox. “That does sound quite dire.”

“Yes, I’m _working_ on it.”

“The door is unchanged?” Noir says, puzzled.

You frown. “Yes?”

“But it’s a cognitive door,” she says. “Shouldn’t… _something_ … happen to the lock, if the corresponding agent has died?”

That’s overthinking the mechanics of cognition, isn’t it? “Well, the door is the same as it always has been. And the door is now broken.”

“But isn’t the lock still there?”

“The cleaner is dead,” you say impatiently. “The lock opened only by the cleaner’s letter doesn’t have a key anymore.”

“But a campaign like Shido’s would be made by the support of others,” says Noir. “His security is created through his team. Isn’t that the point of the door?”

“The point of the door is that you can only enter with the _express permission_ of several individuals, one of whom is—”

“Ah, like Joker’s relationships with us,” says Fox.

Like _Joker_? “What?”

Noir seems hesitant, but Fox looks at her expectantly until she goes on: “Shido is a politician. Or, er, judging by the current models of government… he’s a bit like a CEO of a business. He’s put into office by other high-ranking officials, and he’s sustained in office by the continued patronage of others so long as he turns a profit. Without the strength of his allies, he’s not actually anything but a man. And…”

Noir thinks for a moment.

“His allies are not human,” says Noir. “His allies are organizations—others like his own. And he may have brokered a deal with a single man—like the IT president, or the cleaner—but each of those people also derive _their_ power from the organization they’re the head of. They’re just representative heads of a great mass of power, which is the organization itself. Removing the head of an organization does nothing. The organization itself remains. And, when a head is removed, but the organization and the allyship and all the other trappings remain, so the _position_ remains.”

Fox looks at her blankly. You look at her blankly. “I take it back. I understand nothing,” says Fox.

She ducks her head, apologizes quickly, switches to a different metaphor: “You know how Joker always has someone who can heal on the front line?”

“Of course.”

“There’s always a heavy-hitter, and always someone for buffs and debuffs, and usually the nulls and resists are split among the team. We fill niches that help the team run. And removing one of us from the position—if, say, the healer is out of magic and is pulled back…”

“…that means that someone else is put in who can heal, to fill the position,” says Fox. “Mm! Yes. Yes, now I see.”

“A power vacuum,” you say flatly. That’s what she was getting at with her longwinded explanation of organizations and alliances.

“I suppose,” Noir says. “The cleaner isn’t a person. The cleaner is a position. Like in a business, or a team. I would have thought that anyone who fills the position would be able to open the lock.”

Maybe there’s more to Noir than her initial spinelessness would imply.

This, of course, means that she’s a threat to your good standing with Joker. But one thing at a time.

“And I would have assumed, given the size of Shido’s conspiracy, that he would have found a different cleaner already,” Noir goes on, oblivious.

“That doesn’t sound right,” says Fox. “Don’t yakuza tend to have a period of transition when one clan leader has died? If the previous cleaner has suffered a mental shutdown, there may be some time before the power structure has restabilized.”

“Is that how it works?”

“It’s not like I’ve spent time in yakuza clans. I watched movies.”

“Oh, I didn’t take you to be someone who watches movies, Fox!”

“I watched them with Joker, actually. He is quite fond of simply walking into a movie theatre at random. It’s incredibly bold and refreshing, in my opinion.”

“Ah, he’s quite good at expanding other people’s horizons, isn’t he? I heard something similar from Queen!”

 _I get it_ , you want to want to scream, _you’re better friends with Joker than I am_ —do they have to flaunt it in your face? While they all talk about betrayal and undermining his authority and going to the movies with him in the same breath? “The idea that the cleaner is a position rather than a person is only a theory,” you say sharply.

It’s also not a very _good_ theory. You highly doubt that Noir’s half-baked pie-in-the-sky daydreaming can really pan out in any way. Otherwise you’d have to kill them.

Both Noir and Fox fall silent. Noir hesitates. “It’s also the only theory we have so far,” says Fox amiably.

Yes, you _got it_ , you’re not doing your job, you’re not useful to Joker, you’re failing him as you speak. You _get it_. Is Fox some special breed of bastard who’s figured out how to insult others while maintaining a façade of complete and utter neutral sincerity, or is he simply really this ambivalent about everything? “I would like Joker’s opinion on the matter.”

“No,” says Noir.

You stare at her. Noir does not hold your gaze; does not even try. “I know that you mean… well,” says Noir. “But don’t you think that being close with him right now is doing him more harm than good?”

You don’t think that’s her decision to make. Joker makes that decision. The sheer gall of her to speak as if she’s ready to snatch authority from under his nose—to simply _assume_ that she can take advantage of Joker’s weakness to seize leadership…

“I just know that when you lose someone… there’s a hole where they used to be,” says Noir. “And you find something—or someone—to stand where they were, if you have to. Not… not to call you a replacement, but…”

“But you do look exactly like Akechi-kun,” says Fox.

“ _Fox_!”

“I hope you are aware that you are essentially a rebound,” says Fox.

“That’s not—! I didn’t—!” Noir covers her mouth, looking mortified, as if your feelings are going to be hurt by the objective fact that you exist for other people to use you. “I’m concerned that _Joker_ isn’t going to move on!”

“That too,” says Fox.

If anything, Noir looks sympathetic towards you now. “It’s not personal at all,” she assures you.

“Besides the fact that you murdered Akechi,” says Fox.

“It’s _not personal_ because he wasn’t our teammate,” says Noir.

“No, he was just Joker’s first love.”

Noir breathes very deeply. “We just want what’s best for Joker,” Noir insists. “That’s all it is.”

Hm. Cute. You’ll never agree with a backstabbing snake like her, but you can indulge her attempt to find common ground with you. Unfortunately, you don’t want what’s “best for Joker”; you want to do whatever Joker wants.

“I also want what’s best for him,” you say blandly. Think about Joker. Joker will not appreciate you stabbing her in the throat here and now. When you kill her, you have to find a way to hide the body first. “If you’ll excuse me. I will investigate your… theory… for now. I look forward to providing Joker with positive results in the near future.”

Noir breathes out, looking relieved. “Yes. Um. Yes. Okay. We’ll… come back soon. Good luck until then.”

“Thank you,” you say, wondering if she’ll show her truest colors when she’s in her death throes, contemplating exactly what tools you’d require to draw it out long enough to make her snap. You’d like to see how far her faux politeness will go. You’d like to see how much Joker will like her when she’s broken. After a tense moment, she nods, looks uncertainly at Fox, and retreats to the entrance to the other reality.

Fox turns to go, then pauses. Turns back. “I would like to second her concern over your relationship with Joker. We are all very concerned for him,” says Fox. There is absolutely no deceit in his voice. If anything, he is _uncomfortably_ guileless. “Although I do not know all the details of his relationship with Akechi-kun, and I am not under the impression that they knew each other for more than a few months, a strong bond is easily formed in a short period of time nevertheless. We all hope to be there for him.”

Well, Fox has been mildly less irritating than Noir throughout this conversation. At least he was straightforward with you. “Of course. I mean to do my best to support him.”

“I also would like to second Noir’s belief that such an action would be the opposite of helping,” says Fox, without any venom or judgment whatsoever. “Plainly speaking, I don’t believe he can move on while becoming involved with someone who will so obviously remind him of who he’s lost. To say nothing of the fact that you are Akechi’s murderer.”

“That’s not your call to make,” you say. “It’s Joker’s, and Joker’s alone. And I don’t understand how a team under his leadership can stand here and refuse to listen to his decisions.”

Fox blinks. “Please do not mistake me, Cognitive Akechi. Joker asked me to be here as the level head, to keep the peace for Noir’s sake. If not for my esteem for Joker’s decisions, I would say that you are far more irritating that I would have ever anticipated, and I have no qualms in condemning you for your actions, and I have no interest in listening to your opinions.” He nods shortly. “For the sake of the mission, I wish you luck. I hope I never speak to you again.” With that, he disappears into the other reality, leaving you alone.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i probably should have clarified earlier--idk WHAT is going on in shido's palace with the five rec letter guys being also shadows, but for the sake of this plot, i'm taking as the rec letter guys are actually the shadows of the guys in the real world. makoto said smthg about how the cognitions in shido's palace have fused with shadows, but iirc she didnt really specify if it was general miscellaneous shadows or if it was the Actual Shadows of those exact people who somehow manifested in shido's palace in the same way that smaller target will have their shadows manifest in mementos. either way, the encounters with the five rec letter dudes are so similar to encounters with targets in mementos that i always kind of thought that the shadows you fight for the rec letters were the Actual Shadows of those people, and that the phantom thieves had changed the hearts of those folks in the process. so for the purposes of this fic, when cog akechi shot the cleaner in chapter 1, the cleaner in the real world had a mental shutdown.
> 
> you can correct me if i'm wrong but i cant really change this plot point anymore because it happened all the way in chapter 1 so idk if it would do any good. LMAO.

God, the _snobbery_ —the smug condescension of Noir’s stupid fucking “replacement” theory, like you need it flashed in your face that Joker considers you a bargain bin knock-off of someone else—how _accomplished_ she must feel, thinking she got away with all those double-meanings and implications and subtle metaphors about _positions not people_ and all that _garbage_ about how you’re just a Goro-Akechi-lookalike to _fill the position_ of Joker’s dead boyfriend to really hammer home over and over and over and over and over—

The woman screams as you break her spine, then goes limp. You continue to push the kidneys around with a vengeance, but there’s surprisingly little of use once you’ve harvested the ribcage. “Quiet,” you say, when she won’t stop crying, but obviously this does nothing now that she knows there’s no hope for her and she has nothing to lose.

Where were you?—right, Noir’s _incessant_ need to remind you that you aren’t on his team, that you can’t be useful _after_ all, that Joker doesn’t need you or even _shouldn’t_ need you—non-cognitive people are just absolutely _insufferable_ with their high-and-mighty flesh and blood bodies and their so-called _permanence_ , as if they too don’t also die when their bodies give out like any other cognition wiped out by a palace’s collapse. And for god’s sake, _Fox_ , the two-faced, vile piece of shit.

The very idea of Joker running around with such obvious societal trash drives you up the _wall_. They could not be more obviously the scum of the country that the captain seeks to purge. You can’t wait for the captain’s new country to come to fruition and wipe these filthy slugs off the face of the earth.

Is that what Joker’s going to be left with when you’re gone? A girl who possessively stakes her claim on Joker at every single second, who refuses to listen to orders and undermines his decisions behind his back? A boy who’s mastered the art of lying so well that even _you_ thought he was being honest? How long before they abandon him, like the cleaner was going to abandon the captain? How long before they decide that he isn’t useful as a leader anymore? And you’re just supposed to sit here and let the palace consume you when it falls and let those two _monsters_ destroy Joker the second you turn your ba—

“I’ll talk!” a man blurts out.

You turn back to the group of yakuza you’ve found still skulking around the bowels of the ship. They’re lined up against the far wall of the freezer, their breath coming out cold and their naked muscles visibly contracting in an effort to stay warm after almost an hour of kneeling on the frozen metal floor.

The woman on your table is probably dead. You forgot to notice.

More of fucking _Noir’s_ fault. Making you careless. You never did anything but focus on the job in front of you before; you didn’t have anything else to focus _on_. Fucking women—they find a way to distract you even when you’re a freshly-made homosexual. You scrape the blood off into woman’s chest cavity, where the warm steam still rises in the freezer air.

“I never wanted to get involved in the first place!” the man is wailing, mostly to himself.

“Mizuno—!”

“I’ll tell you anything you need to know!” he cries.

He’s sitting right next to the cleaner’s body, so that might have something to do with his lack of spine. Or maybe death just makes everyone self-centered. Still, you don’t put stock in people who crack early; the captain doesn’t trust them, so their testimony tends to be… “inadmissible in court,” so to speak. You pick a throwing knife and toss it into his gut at twenty paces.

There’s the usual screaming, some tears, the typical amount of limbs thrashing on the ground. He squirms so much trying to get the knife out with his hands still tied behind his back that the smell of stomach acid bubbles up around the knife hilt before you can even twist it, because nobody lets you have fun around here.

“No self-respect,” you say. “You’d just give up like that. What happened to yakuza family loyalty, hm?”

The cognitions whimper. Well, it’s not like the captain thinks that yakuza loyalty goes very far in the face of his all-consuming reign, but the lack of loyalty is still abhorrent—both to you and to the captain.

You just have to go through the motions. Put in a show of having actually looked into Noir’s idea, so that you can convince Joker of how worthy you are of his attention. But god, if it isn’t an annoying task. Now they’re just sitting there, waiting for you to do something because you killed the first one to talk, brainless and mindlessly waiting for someone else to call the shots—as you do when you’re a cognition— _pathetic_.

“Who’s the crown prince?” you ask without any enthusiasm whatsoever.

Nobody speaks. Too scared.

Fucking worthless cognitions.

“You,” you say, pointing to the man next to the stomach acid guy. The whites of his eyes grow. “What’s your name.”

“G… Gima. Uh, sir.”

Respecting you doesn’t get anyone anywhere. If he’s going to die, it’s not because he forgot to call you _sir_. “Gima. Who was next in line if the cleaner died?”

Gima is shaking. “The clan’s not a monarchy.”

You look at him.

“The cleaner didn’t die. He's still technically alive in the intensive care u—"

You shoot him in the hip. The pelvis makes a sound like a second gunshot when it shatters into his intestines. You sit on your haunches, bored, as the whole cycle of screaming, whimpering, begging, rolling on the ground, so on and so forth begins all over again. You wish someone would do something interesting when you torture them.

Or maybe you just wish you were torturing someone interesting; you’re sure that Joker could do all the typical things and you’d eat up anything he did. And even if Noir wasn’t interesting, at least killing her would be satisfying.

Eventually, Gima pulls himself back together with an embarrassing amount of resignation that makes you really consider just killing him here and finding someone else who’ll put up a decent fight. The other prisoners keep avoiding looking at him, like his misfortune is contagious. “Nobody knows who’ll be the clan leader,” he says tearfully. “It’s been that way as long as I can remember.”

“The cleaner never picked out an heir?”

“People like the cleaner or the captain don’t bank on dying,” Gima says.

Right, they bank on other people dying for them. For some reason, you had expected the cleaner to be a bit more of a hands-on leader, rather than letting other people dirty their hands for him. Does power and leadership corrupt everyone in the same way? Will Joker one day become someone who expends others to do his dirty work for him? Oh, wait, he already is; that’s what you’re doing.

“Who’re the contenders?” you ask.

“H-He has a… a s-son and two daughters.”

The way he won’t stop fucking _crying_ is driving you up the wall. It looks fake. Like the way your face felt in the social floor, all smile and nothing in the eyes. Like Noir’s unbelievable insistence on playing up her frail little doll act, when obviously she’s hiding more up her sleeve than she’d like you to believe. Was Joker taken in by that façade, too? Did Joker fall for the damsel act so she could steal his team out from under him?

“He refused to discount his daughters,” Gima sniffles. The sound of it grates nails on the inside of your ribs. “They were supposed to have an equal shot at inheriting the clan. The cleaner supported them even when they disagreed with his decision to back Shido…”

You shove the woman off the table, thinking to yourself: What an idiot move, keeping around a pair of girls who actively and openly disagreed with their own father. If only because nobody in the yakuza ring would have ever seriously respected a female leader. The cleaner might as well have set an expiration date on his clan. Strong male control is a must, as the captain always says.

Gima sputters on: “It was the son… Hiroyuki… who has always supported the captain. Now that the cleaner is gone, Hiroyuki’s being outvoted by the twins…”

“The twins don’t like the captain,” you repeat. You’re contemplating the odds that Hiroyuki is on this cruise ship somewhere—probably not the twins, since the cruise ship contains only the captain’s allies on principle, otherwise you could go straight to them and investigate what you can find.

“Hiroyuki seeks to restore the clan to g-greatness. The twin sisters seek progressive action, even peace and cooperation. The clan itself is prepared for a long and bitter battle for custody of the clan. It may even split. It will be a blow to the captain.”

You think it over. Try to remember what it is that Noir said about organizations. “He’ll lose one of his strongest backer organizations if it does. He’ll still have someone to clean up the bodies, but not as powerful.” That might destroy the lock altogether—

— _if_ Noir is right.

You take a very deep breath. Pinch the bridge of your nose despite not having a headache. It seems like a thing you do when you have a physical body and despise everything around you. “Names?”

“M… Mari Tsukishima. Chiyoko Sawano. Chiyoko changed her last name when she married…”

“And that’s everything?”

Gima nods low, like the sniveling wastebasket of a human that he is. Or rather, like the sniveling wastebasket of a human that the captain thinks he is. You suppose you can’t comment on the Gima in the other reality.

You throw your tools down. It clatters next to the woman’s picked ribs. “God _fucking_ dammit,” you announce.

“That’s everything I know! That’s everything! There’s nothing else—“

“ _Shut up_ ,” you snarl. “Do you know what you’ve done? Because of you, that bitch has a lead!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Gima cries.

“ _Noir_! Now her theory sounds plausible! You couldn’t have just said that the clan was doing just fine?! You couldn’t have stayed loyal to your master _like you were supposed to_?!”

“I-I-I thought y-you wanted me to—“

“I wanted to do a fucking _obligatory background check_ ,” you snarl, “so that I could tell Joker that I did my due diligence and his precious Noir is an _idiot_.” You grab your knife, advance on him; he shoves his flabby naked body up against the wall like it’ll save him. You grab him by the hair anyway and drag him into the center of the room. Gima is screaming.

“What am I supposed to do now?!” you bellow. “Tell him she’s right?! Put _her_ in his good graces?!”

“I didn’t know,” Gima wails, high and shrill like a girl. “I’m sorry, you can just pretend you never heard it—“

You drive your foot into his clavicle with your whole weight. On the second try, it snaps, pushing a little white bone fragment like a tooth through his shoulder skin. “LIE TO JOKER?” you scream.

Gima blabber something you don’t care about. You pick up the hammer and hold it reversed, so the pick side faces forward, and pry the other clavicle out of him like a nail.

“You think I’d lie to Joker even if I could?!” you yell. You grip him by the broken bones and pull him up. His whole body jerks like a malfunctioning puppet; the more you pull at the broken strings and nerves attached to his bones, the more the body dances. “You think you get a say in what your masters ask of you?! You think I get a say?! You really think I can just _choose not to_?!”

He hits the ground hard when you drop him. The metal freezer floor is so cold you can practically hear his skin sizzle.

“You’re such a waste of space,” you spit. “Can’t even keep your master’s secrets. Worthless shit like you deserves to die.”

You take a moment to break the legs with the sledgehammer, just to make sure he isn’t going anywhere, and then you take the woman’s ribs from the table. You wrench Gima’s head back to expose his eyes. “Hold still,” you hiss.

Realizing what you’re about to do, Gima’s mouth says something pitiful and unimportant. You can’t wait to tear Noir apart. Boil her alive, peel the skin off her limb by limb, cut up into pieces. Maybe you’ll eat her and digest her and make all her flesh and blood yours, grow her hair from your head and bask in Joker deciding to cut it short for you. You’ll open up all the muscles like a suitcase and you’ll pull out the part of her that made her such a fucking _upstart_ about goddamn everything Joker said—the part that thinks for itself, the part that refuses others and says _No_ , rearrange her from the inside until she was perfectly and beautifully organized just to Joker’s liking.

She wants to have _opinions_? She wants to _think_? You’ll shred that part of her with your own bare nails, until she doesn’t care about anything anymore, and Joker will finally be happy and he’ll always have a use for you and you won’t mind anything he does.

“Please, no, please,” Gima wails, weeping punctured eye fluid. His eyelids struggle to close around the rib bone. With the bone sticking out of his eye, it reminds you of a snail parasite’s eye stalk, growing out of the skull like horns.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” you sneer, reaching for the next rib. “You’re just a cognition. You’re not even real.”

*

You spend a lot of time waiting for Joker to come back, after that. You did your due diligence and investigated the matter. You found something useful. You’re not _required_ to make Noir look any better in Joker’s eyes than she already looks.

It’s not like she’s _right_. She just _looks_ right, at the current moment. Whether or not the Thieves get involved with trying to replace the cleaner will have no actual bearing on the lock on the captain’s door. When the Thieves finally show up, you grit your teeth, think of Joker, and give your report punctually and without enthusiasm.

To your surprise, everyone looks dismayed.

“You’re asking us to destroy two women for nothing else but to make Shido’s power base _stronger_?” says Queen in disbelief.

“Is there a problem with that?” you say.

“Uh, yeah,” says Skull, “seems kinda counter—uh, counterint…”

“Counterintuitive,” says Queen.

“Yeah, that thing. Seems dumb as hell to make the guy we’re trying to defeat _stronger_.” Skull scratches the back of his head. “Also, I dunno about everyone else, but I’d feel kinda shitty beatin’ up these two ladies we don’t even know anythin’ about…”

“Hiroyuki is clearly a conservative and a reactionary,” says Queen. “We might be doing untold amounts of damage to Tokyo’s clan balance by putting him in power over the more peaceful twins. It would doubtlessly lead to more casualties, more police involvement, and more civilian involvement.”

“We don’t even know anything about these women,” says Oracle. “We have names, but no history, no list of crimes, no potential keywords if they’re not in Mementos. Besides the moral bit, I don’t even know if we can pull it off logistically.”

“Can we really change the hearts of someone who’s trying to _improve_ the clan?” Panther asks. She sounds extremely uncomfortable.

Oracle frowns. “Well, they _are_ still yakuza… Ladies or not, I doubt they’re _totally_ blameless. And the fact that we can change their hearts at all means there’s a distortion there.”

“We don’t know if we can change their hearts! We haven’t even looked.”

They’re sitting here with the election date breathing down their back, trying to cram a secondary mission under their already-tight current mission deadline, and they’re going to debate _morality_? Their incompetency astounds you every day. Moving the world is already a difficult enough task; to willingly chain yourself to the societal norms and concepts of right and wrong is the difference between improbable and impossible. The fact that Medjed didn’t take them out the first go around is almost hysterical. The fact that _Akechi_ couldn’t even take out _one_ of them is—well, you hope that the captain never learns the depths of Akechi’s incompetence, or else you fear you’ll dissolve into a piece of spineless, limbless skin on the ground.

“Is it _really_ so important to consider the workings of a yakuza clan when the current issue is who takes the seat as _Prime Minister_?” you say.

“All things are important,” says Fox. “No matter how small.”

You can’t believe you ever thought that Fox was less of a bitch than Noir.

“It’s true,” says Joker. “Someone told me once that declaring the ends justify the means is just another way of giving up on your own ideals.”

Noir throws Joker a look. “Dude, is this really the time to be quoting someone like Ake—“ Skull begins, before Panther elbows him hard in the ribs, like the very name is cursed.

“We’ll have to take a vote,” Queen says at last. “Unanimous decision required, as usual. This is… well, it’s not exactly an easy task you’ve given us, er—um, Cognitive Akechi.” She says it oddly, like she’s announcing someone’s full name: first name Cognitive, last name Akechi.

Your malformed brain grinds to life. You see the opportunity before you clearly. The captain, as you once said to Joker, does not consider you an idiot after all.

“My apologies. Perhaps I shouldn’t have pursued Noir’s idea,” you say.

Queen looks surprised. Oracle and Panther make a stereo chorus of surprised noises. Noir shrinks immediately. “This was _your_ idea?” Queen says.

“I hadn’t known that there would be a succession war preventing a new cleaner from replacing the old one…” she says quickly. “I hadn’t thought, um… I hadn’t thought that we’d be tasked with making such a choice..”

You scoff. No commitment. No follow-through. “Don’t be modest, Noir. Like Fox said, it’s hardly like we had any other ideas, isn’t it? A terrible decision—” you just barely stress the word _terrible_ “—is much better than having no decisions at all.”

Noir lowers the brim of her hat. Her shadowed eye looks right through you, marks you and your words down for future reference. You smile again.

“We’ll figure it out,” says Queen firmly. The tone of her voice implies you are not welcome in this decision-making process. Joker does not correct her. Another upstart woman thinking she can tell Joker what to do. “Thank you for the information.”

You smile unpleasantly. “Of course. I live to serve,” you say, and hold Noir’s stare without blinking at all.


	9. Chapter 9

You are an incorrect and incomplete replacement for Goro Akechi, and you spend your days waiting for Joker to come back. He has to, eventually; whether Noir’s plan to replace the cleaner works or not, he will either come back to the drawing board with you or he will proceed to open the captain’s door. So it’s only a matter of time.

The days are long, if there are really “days” on the cruise ship. Time passes in the captain’s subconscious, but the world remains sunny and bright, as his vision of the future is unrelenting. You spend most of your time on the deck, avoiding the other passengers, in case more instances like Arai occur. You are not asked to do anything by the captain. You feel yourself becoming discarded. Having done your job too well, you are no longer required.

You begin to spend a lot of time on the left edge of the deck. Goro Akechi died here. For everything he did, there isn’t even a bloodstain to show for it. Incomprehensible, to falter in the final stage of his own plan for nothing more than one boy.

You wonder why he cared so much. You know why you love Joker—you didn’t get an option, and you know it’s because the captain’s cognition changed—but it seems ludicrous for a human being, capable of free will and decision, to _choose_ to love someone else. Or maybe he didn’t choose? Do people choose that sort of thing? The submission of it alone—to lose the game of domination, to give up so much freedom and shackle oneself to another—you can see why the captain would refuse love on principle. The captain would never submit to anything, no matter how large or small, so long as he lived.

By that logic, you wonder if Akechi had already lost long before you killed him. The game was set from the moment something inside him rebelled, threw itself headlong at someone who wasn’t the captain. Did he have a choice about it? Did he simply fall in love at first sight, like a storybook? Or did he look at Joker one day and make the decision to himself to love someone he’d have to kill?

Does Joker make the choice to keep loving Akechi, or is he no longer able to stop himself anymore?

You rest the flat of your cheek against the ship railing. Your legs dangle through the railing bars, drifting high above the ocean water where Akechi’s body was sunk, permanently chained to someone far away who you have no means of contacting and someone who may even hate you. You try not to wonder if loving someone by choice makes love different.

*

The next time you see Joker, he is leaning against the ship’s railing, looking out at the ocean. He doesn’t say anything when you approach. He hunches his shoulders a little higher, tucks his face behind the high collar of his coat. The cognitive sun overhead is deceptively cheerful against his visibly shadowed mood.

His stare is guarded, dull. He looks tired in a way sleep will not fix. Despite the permanent daytime over the captain’s ship, you are almost certain it is late at night in the other reality.

You obviously are not the reason he came. He came to visit the last place he saw Akechi’s body.

“Joker?” you ask.

His eyes flick towards you. Like you’re interrupting his visit to the real Akechi.

His eyes flicker to the gun holstered at your side, then—in a clear dismissal of any threat you might have posed—away.

“Did it work?” you say, suddenly worried that you’ve completely miscalculated and you’ve put the captain in danger after all. Not only does this mean you’ll have endangered the captain, but then you’ll have to deal with _Noir_ thinking her existence is more than a colossal waste of space.

You think he’s going to say something, but he just keeps looking at you—or rather, at Akechi’s face which you inherited. Did he mean what he said that you didn’t resemble him at all? Are you still insufficient? Maybe he still wants you dead, and this is why he is here again alone.

At last, Joker says, “The change of heart for the Tsukishimas went through. We’re still waiting on Oracle to get the word to Shido, and then the change in cognition.” He tips his head. “So. You really did help us.”

You sigh in relief.

Since Noir’s plan won’t work anyway, this means that the Phantom Thieves will waste valuable time in the face of the upcoming election, the captain will be safe, _and_ Joker finally sees that you meant it when you said you love him. (If, for some reason, this plan actually _does_ work, you’ll simply have to put a stop to the Phantom Thieves yourself. Hiroyuki will presumably manifest as a cognition here should it work, and you can just kill him again. You’ll just have to do it without Joker knowing about it.) But the most important part is Joker: that he believes you now, when you say that you’d move the world and resurrect the dead out of love for him.

“I told you that I would help you,” you say.

For some reason, he sighs heavily. “Why?”

 _Why_? “Because I—"

“What’s your play?” Joker says, like you hadn’t spoken. “Trying to get on our good side? Are you trying to make us take you with us out of the palace? Are you trying to join the group?”

You stare at him in confusion. “No?”

“Then what do you _want_?” Joker says again, frustrated.

Does he really think there’s some sort of ulterior motive? Are you supposed to have one? On this ship, there’s only people who are loyal to the captain and those who pretend to be—that’s about the depth of complex motivations.

“I want you to love me,” you say.

This time, Joker doesn’t flinch—on the outside, at least. But his silence goes on a second too long. “You really have a one-track mind.”

“I mean it. In the same way that I meant that I’d find a way into the sanctuary for you. Ah, but, if you don’t love me, or you can’t or you won’t, I understand—I’ll really take anything you’re willing to give so long as you’ll keep me around, so please don’t feel pressured to…”

“You don’t get it, do you,” says Joker. “Now that we know how to get into the treasure room, we don’t need you anymore.”

Ah. The expiration date has come to pass, like the election day for the captain’s plans. You’re not required anymore. You might even become a liability, as you would have been for the captain.

You lower your head.

“Whatever you need,” you say. “Please don’t hesitate to be rid of me if that’s what you need from me.”

If it has even the slightest chance of making Joker look upon you more kindly, you’ll take it.

“You really just fall over yourself for me,” says Joker. You can’t read his voice. “I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t be total waste of time.”

Your head shoots back up. “What do you _want_ from me?” you ask, frustrated.

Joker hunches deeper into his coat. “Nothing, apparently. You can’t give me anything I want. Go away.”

“Wait!” you say quickly, shoving yourself closer in case he gets the idea to leave. “Joker. I would make anything possible for you.”

His face hidden by his collar. Only his single black eye looks down at you, and you have no idea what expression he’s making under the mask. But his voice is soft—deceptively so. “You’re going to resurrect the dead, then? Maybe turn yourself into him, to bring him back to life?”

“I would do it,” you say without hesitation.

Joker whips around in a spray of black leather. “The Goro Akechi I knew wouldn’t have just let me push him around!”

He advances on you so fast you nearly fall over yourself trying to scramble away. His mask is huge and white in your face, taking up your entire vision. “He didn’t fall over himself for whatever I wanted,” Joker hisses. “He would have _laughed_ at the very idea. He told me ‘No’ at least twenty times a day. He wouldn’t let me intimidate him. He wasn’t afraid to put a bullet in my head if that’s what it took to get what he wanted. He wouldn’t even _hesitate_ to cut me down to size. And when Goro wanted something, he took it without apology.”

And then he looks at you expectantly. You stand frozen, leaning backwards so the tip of his mask doesn’t spear your nose.

“ _Well_?” he demands, when you don’t say anything.

He doesn’t love you. He wants you to be Goro Akechi. Goro Akechi wanted things—things that Joker didn’t want, even, and he took it anyway. Joker wants Goro Akechi.

Do you want things that the captain doesn’t want?

Do you want things that Joker doesn’t want?

At last, Joker looks away. Stands back up without looking at you. “Never mind.”

“Wait—no, I can do it, I can be more like him if that’s what you want—”

“Don’t say it like that,” he says sharply. You shut up. Instantly, he says: “Goro would have never let me tell him what to do.”

You ruined it. You keep ruining it. “If I asked you to jump in the ocean and drown,” Joker goes on relentlessly, “would you do it?”

You already told him you would. “Of course,” you say, reaching out for him.

He pulls his arm away sharply, his mouth twisting. “You don’t ever say no, huh? Are you a people pleaser now? Or is it just me?”

“There are other people I don’t say no to.”

“Like who?”

“The captain,” you say. He should know that already, though. “Anyone the captain holds in high esteem and needs to keep happy.”

“You can’t say no, or you won’t say no?”

You look at him. “I don’t say no.”

That makes Joker laugh loudly, even, like the very idea of a Goro Akechi who doesn’t say no is hysterical to him. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you,” he says, and turns on his heel.

You feel your heart stop. “You’re leaving?”

Joker waves a hand dismissively.

“You just got here! You can’t go—when am I going to see you again—are you coming back—"

“You’re not even real enough to want things!” Joker calls back over his shoulder.

“I—that’s not true,” you say, although it is entirely true with the exception of how much you want Joker. “Joker, I can do better—I want you to stay, does that count—?”

“You don’t even want anything badly enough to betray me,” Joker scoffs. “What’s the fucking use of you?!”

That’s a _bold_ statement to say to someone who openly carries a gun at his side—or it would be, were you not incapable of going against Joker’s wishes. Instead, you scrabble desperately for something you actually want. Something that’ll make you more like Goro Akechi—

“I want to know what you showed the captain!” you blurt out.

You’re surprised to discover that you’re telling the truth.

Joker obviously knows what you mean immediately, because he stops in his tracks. When he turns around, his entire expression has shut down. “You mean to change his cognition of Goro? Why?”

You open your mouth, and then stop: _Goro Akechi wouldn’t even hesitate to cut me down to size_.

“It’s none of your business,” you say instead, in a weak echo of Joker’s earlier words.

Joker’s eyebrows raise. “It kind of is. Considering I’m the one who did it.”

 _Goro Akechi wouldn’t let me intimidate him_.

“Then you should take responsibility for making me the way I am,” you reply. You pray he hasn’t noticed the pause in your voice, the halts where you search desperately for the right lines to say. “If anyone has the right to know what you did, it’s me.”

Joker scoffs. “You’re not even—” _real_ , you guess the next word is, but Joker doesn’t even get that far before he’s turning away again.

 _He told me ‘No’ at least twenty times a day_.

You block his way smoothly. He looks a little shocked to see how fast you can move. His eyes flicker back down to the gun at your side.

You wait until he’s looking you in the eyes to speak. “You come into this palace just to yell at me and you won’t even do _one_ thing I ask? I want to see it, Joker.”

“I came here to kill you,” Joker replies, “if you really must know. And it’s not too late to follow through on that.”

 _When Goro wanted something, he took it without apology_.

“I’d like to see you try,” you reply coldly. “If that’s the way you’d like to play, I’ll pry it out of you at gunpoint if I need to.”

Something about Joker seems to stand taller, now. His focus has narrowed the world down to the two of you alone. For a long second, neither of you move, and if you had a breath to hold, you would.

You almost can’t believe it when he pulls out his phone—not quite willingly, and not quite like surrender, but he does it. Almost like he’s curious to see where this goes. He hands it over to you without a word.

No signal, of course, but the apps seem to work alright. He flips to his photo gallery. “We showed him text screenshots,” he says shortly. “Some other things.”

You peer over his shoulder. He leans towards you, letting your shoulder rest against his. The camera roll is endless screenshots of _Good morning ;)_ and _billiards tonight?_ and _Can u call me? I just want to hear you._

You take the phone out of his hand and swipe through his camera roll quickly. “I… didn’t know cognitions could use touchscreens,” he says. You ignore him.

Near the end of the series is where the photos start: Pictures of Goro Akechi poking at something that looks more cream than substance, one eyebrow raised at the photographer as if sharing an extremely dry, mean-spirited private joke. Joker and Akechi at an aquarium; Joker looks enthused about a cheap gift-shop item that already looks to be fraying at the edges, while Akechi looks reluctantly charmed by Joker’s idiocy. A lot of photos of coffee and little fruity alcoholic beverages with umbrellas, for some reason. A selfie of Akechi looking smug while, in the background, Joker bends over a pool table trying to do a trick shot. A photo of a pissed-off Joker with a pool-ball sized bruise on his forehead. A picture of Akechi sitting cross-legged on a mattress, looking oddly naked with his tie and jacket off and a small bruise along his neck, focusing hard on a chessboard at the foot of the bed. A picture of Joker’s hand wrapped in gauze while Akechi, oblivious that his picture is being taken, cleans up a first aid kid in the background. A picture of Akechi with his shirt off, looking disgruntled at the scratch marks along his arm and chest, some of which look to have been done by a cat and others… not. Akechi obviously half-asleep on a pillow in a streak of yellow sunlight, looking fondly irritated at having his photo taken, the long line of his neck and shoulders entirely bare and his face tilted away from the camera.

“Don’t look at that one,” says Joker suddenly.

You try to swipe to the next photo, but it’s the last in the line. You stare at the photo some more. These are photographs taken with a dedication and loyalty that even you can understand. You tilt your head to match the angle of the Akechi in the photograph.

Joker snatches the phone back from your hand.

“That’s everything we showed him,” he says brusquely. “So. I hope you’re happy.”

“I could be like that,” you say, meaning the photos.

You’ve said the wrong thing, because the look he gives you now is vicious.

“No, I really could be! I could practice to be like him. If I had more information, like those photos—”

He’s shaking his head. He’s holding his phone to his chest carefully.

“Give me a chance,” you snap.

“This was a mistake,” he mutters to himself.

“Joker,” you say, your tone angry. You think you might even _be_ angry, too.

“I’m going,” he announces, like he’s trying to convince himself into doing it.

“You are not. You _just_ got here, we can make this work, if you’d just listen to me and stay for more than five seconds—”

“Noir was right,” Joker says, and your non-existent blood runs cold. “I’m too much of a chickenshit to kill you with you wearing that face.”

_You’re going to resurrect the dead, then? Maybe turn yourself into him, to bring him back to life?_

He waves a hand dismissively. “I’ll send someone else to take care of it.”

Your fingers clench. “Did _Noir_ offer to put me down for you?!”

“Unless you want to do us a favor and kill yourself beforehand,” he says instead.

You swear you see red.

 _When Goro wanted something, he took it without apology_.

_You don’t even want anything badly enough to betray me._

_What’s the fucking use of you?_

The gunshot is surprisingly soft.

He doesn’t fall dramatically. He doesn't even move, at first, going so still that you wonder if you somehow missed; and then he tilts on the side you shot him, and the back of his head tilts down to stare at his shoulder. He sinks like an afterthought, touching down gracefully even now. His inky coat pools around him and spills across the deck. The red of his gloves is indistinguishable from the red of his own blood.

For some reason—even though it was _him_ who wanted you to be more like Goro Akechi—Joker still looks betrayed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i've stopped doing the cws at the end of each chapter because i'm really struggling to figure out how to tag these things but please look at the tags at the top once again because this is the part where [meme voice] oh akechi we're really in it now

For the first time in a long while, you think you finally understand what Joker wants of you.

*

“I shouldn’t have come into the Metaverse alone,” Joker says the second he blinks awake.

“Noir _did_ say,” you reply. You pat the patched-up gunshot wound along his shoulder. You applied a full heal from his supplies to make sure he was alright, but better safe than sorry with Joker’s health.

Sluggishly, Joker struggles to sit up from the mattress. With the jacket off and his vest undone, you can see all the muscles work as he tries to push himself up. He doesn’t get very far with his arms cuffed to the mattress cot, and he goes still the second he sees his ankle chained to a bolt in the floor.

“She did say,” says Joker flatly.

His eyes dart back and forth, scanning for immediate threats. He needn’t have bothered. You’re in a storage room off the main floor of the engine room, where you won’t be bothered or disturbed or have to worry about shadow guards walking in on your human captive. There’s no threats here by design—besides, of course, yourself and your gun, which you’ve placed in full view out of the reach of the ankle chain. You don’t want him thinking you’re going to kill him at any second, but you do want him to remember what weapons you have at your disposal.

There’s an odd steely look in his eye, like he’s got a knife pointed at his neck and there’s nowhere else he’d rather be. “I should have listened when they told me to kill you,” Joker murmurs, sizing you up. His eyes glance at the single light overhead, the dim locked room, the gun on the table on the far end of the room. “Now you’re even recreating the interrogation room.”

The room where Joker was supposed to be assassinated, if Akechi hadn’t fucked it up? It hadn’t been intentional. “Do you like it?” you ask. You know the question sounds sardonic, but it’s not. You honestly want to know.

His expression doesn’t change. Terrifying how much of a mask he wears even though you’ve confiscated his physical one. “Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re mistaken.”

“I’m not,” you say, and sit delicately on the edge of the bed. “I am, in fact, quite sure this is what you wanted.”

And you must do whatever it is that he wants, if it’ll make him love you.

“You think I want to be locked up in a dark room, chained to the floor like a prisoner, and threatened?”

“Very on brand for Akechi, from what I heard. And you wanted me to be more like Akechi, didn’t you?”

Joker is doing some sort of calculation inside his own head. You should have gotten a room with more lights, because Joker hides in the shadows of the lightbulb like it’s a second skin.

You lean in closer. “Tell me how to be him.”

“You’re crazy,” says Joker.

“Is that in character for Akechi?”

Joker opens his mouth, and then stops. “Let me go.”

“You said that Akechi wouldn’t let you boss him around. You said he wasn’t afraid to take what he wanted. I have you chained up and at my mercy. Your friends don’t even know where you are. Why should I?”

Joker’s face is unreadable. When the silence stretches on, you sigh and stand up.

You meant to get dinner, since from the pictures it seemed like wining and dining Joker was something that Akechi did at least sometimes. If you’re going to be him, you’re going to get all the details right—

Joker says suddenly, “When he asked a question, he made sure he got an answer. He wouldn’t have let me get away without answering. Akechi wouldn’t just give up like that.”

You stop. “It was a rhetorical question.”

“He didn’t ask rhetorical questions,” Joker says, “except to make sure I knew what he was threatening.”

What would Akechi do? You’re not sure. The look you shoot Joker now is frustrated, resentful, and entirely your own. “Then consider this _my_ threat, Joker.”

“Akechi would make good on his threats.”

 _Now_ you spin around to face him fully. “And you think I _won’t_?”

For some reason, even with his hands chained in front of him and his ankle chained to the floor, his imposing jacket off in a heap on the floor, Joker still looks like he’s entirely in control. As if being chained to a dingy cot in a windowless room in the bowels of the captain’s ship is exactly where he wants to be, and being cuffed to the floor of the engine room was even a part of his plan, and the cuffs around his wrists are only bracelets he allows you to put on him for the time being, before he gets tired of this. You can’t tell how much of this is true and how much of it is his phantom thief bravado.

“Well.” Joker tilts his head mockingly. “It _is_ you. You tell _me_ if you’re capable of defying what I want, _Cognitive Akechi_.”

You almost bare your teeth. What will it _take_ to please him? “I’ll show you,” you snarl, and whirl around and slam the door hard enough to rattle the frame, and then realized belatedly that not standing your ground when Joker needles you is probably exactly what Akechi _wouldn’t_ have done.

Fuck.

*

You don’t quite mope on your way to the restaurant and back, but you do spend a lot of time thinking about whether or not Joker can actually digest cognitive food, and whether or not you really can keep Joker here against his will. How far does he want you to go? When he says that he wanted Akechi to stand up to him, to even use force as necessary, does that mean he wants you to intentionally hurt him? How will you know if you hurt him too much?

Maybe this relationship that they had was more complex than you realized.

Is that why Joker hasn’t been able to stand it when you say that you love him? Was the captain _wrong_ about Goro Akechi? Was there more to Akechi than the captain thought? Are you a bad copy? You do not consider the possibility that the captain’s judgment of another’s character is incorrect, except that you must consider that something here has gone very wrong if you are not able to make Joker love you when the captain himself seems quite convinced that Joker loves Goro Akechi.

The only thing that isn’t adding up is you. The captain is not wrong. Joker is not wrong. It’s just you.

The plate of food grows heavier with every step you take back towards Joker’s room. You don’t even know what he likes to eat. You figured steak would be fine, since it’s the specialty they have at the restaurant, but—shit, what if he’s a vegetarian or something? One of those pescatarians or whatever they’re called—oh, fuck, what if he’s a vegan and the captain just never knew that the leader of the Phantom Thieves doesn’t eat animal products. Does the restaurant even _have_ vegetarian options? Are you allowed to care about this if Joker wants you to disrespect his wishes? Is caring about what your lover wants something you’re supposed to do, or just another one of Akechi’s many flaws in the captain’s eyes?

You open the door, more than halfway confused over your own train of thought. “Joker, I—” you say, before you realize Joker is frozen sitting in the middle of the floor, ankle chain broken. Arsène looms behind him, the remnants of Joker’s chains crushed in his hand, so huge in the tiny room that Arsène blocks out the light itself. And, as if in slow motion before your eyes, Joker is raising the barrel of the gun to point at your face.

The first thing you think is that you shouldn’t have left the gun behind, even if it was all the way on the other side of the room. You should have known better than to forget about Joker’s Persona.

The second thing you think is that he’s going to miss because he’s aiming for the head. Unless you’re shooting at point-blank range, anyone who knows anything about guns would aim for the torso, where the target is bigger, broader, and full of vital organs.

The third thing you think is that it’ll be really embarrassing if it turns out, considering that long philosophical conversation with Joker on the deck, you can’t die after all.

The tray of food hits the floor as you drop straight down and the bullet whizzes over your head. By the time Joker’s re-aimed, you’re lunging across the floor, slamming into him with all your weight, sending both of you rolling across the floor. Somehow, Joker still keeps his grip on the gun and knees you hard in the stomach when you reach for it, making you gasp.

You scrabble blindly for his hands and grab the handcuffs chain instead, pulling his arms up like a caught fish. He cries out as the metal digs into his wrists and finally, finally the gun drops to the floor, where you snatch it back up and level it at his throat.

Now he doesn’t move. You think he could probably overpower you with the element of surprise if he punched you, because you’re not sure that you can actually pull this trigger.

“Do it,” says Joker, like he can read your mind. “Go on. I’m escaping. Shoot me.”

You slide your finger around the trigger, if only because Joker told you to. Joker’s grey eyes fix on the gun.

“I’m waiting,” he says.

Claws slide around your throat from behind.

You spin before Arsène can catch you by the neck like a hooked fish and empty the clip into its corset. The lace pops with the strained _twang_ of piano wires and spew fire from the wounds before Arsène vanishes.

That won’t be the last you see of Arsène, you know, but for now you have more important things to worry about, like Joker grabbing you by the back of the head and slamming you face-first into the wall.

Thankfully this doesn’t really do much because the captain doesn’t believe in you being bothered by pain. You pretend to be dizzy until he spins you back around, and then as he leans in, you slam your foot into his gut and topple him across the room. Arsène bursts back to life to catch him before he hits the ground and summons a burst of energy at your head.

You don’t even bother to dodge, just bat it away with your arm. Pain shakes your entire body and your arm goes numb, but you have no doubt that your body won’t fail you now, because it cannot until the captain’s will is done with you. Arsène summons another burst of energy that shakes you to your knees, and another, and another, until you are facedown holding yourself up by your forearm, soundless, waiting for the pain to stop making a nuisance of itself. It’s not going to kill you. You can’t die until Joker loves you.

“Finish it, Arsène!” Joker bellows.

But when Arsène’s claws reach down to crush you, your body seems to move on its own. Divorced from feeling, divorced from thought, you watch your own hands drop the gun and grab Arsène’s popped corset. The flames flare out from the inside, hot against your face like you’ve stuck your head in an oven; your fingers turn black so quickly you don’t even feel the burn until entire seconds later. You don’t stop. You are capable of anything that the captain demands; you are capable of anything that Joker needs. You can do _anything_ , because—even as your arms burn with the strain, as your skin blisters and cracks—because you are _Goro Akechi_ who supported the captain’s entire political career for years and your body will burn before you give up and nothing is impossible so long as you _have to_ , so long as it’s asked of you, so long as it’s _for Joker_ —

Arsène howls and bursts into flame and leather. The corset stretches wide like a mouth, unraveling around the pyre of fire like clothes falling off a ghost. Joker is screaming. You wonder if Joker feeling the manifestation of his soul getting ripped in half is anything like when you were torn in half on the deck of the captain’s ship.

The second Arsène turns to wisps, you stagger into the empty space where he used to be. Joker collapses instantly.

For a second, both of you just sway where you are. Joker is hunched over his heart, like you’ve ripped it out of him. And you—you feel like a clay pot left in the oven too long. You’re almost certain that if you touch your face, brittle chunks will fall away. You think that might be bad, if Joker loves your face because it looks like Akechi’s. You are not sure there’s anything under the skin except void and empty air. You hope Joker doesn’t have to see that.

Joker’s voice is so raw you don’t realize he’s speaking until he brandishes a hand, weakly and without his usual grandiose flair, to summon again. “ _Persona_ ,” he says hoarsely.

Nothing happens.

You wipe soot and flickering flames away from your face. “Out of magic?”

Joker’s eyes narrow. He’s breathing so hard you can see his tongue glisten in his mouth. You think it probably wasn’t great that you tore a literal part of his psyche apart.

“No more Personas, Joker,” you say lowly. “Just you and me.”

And for some reason, Joker’s face splits into a—not a grin, but something like a wolf baring its teeth. “Fine,” he says, in that harsh, raspy voice, and staggers to his feet, planting his boots viciously into the carpet like a stab of a knife. “You and me.”

He holds out a hand, like he’s inviting you to dance. You hesitate.

“If you think you can _really_ hurt me,” he mocks.

You lunge.

Joker’s knife flashes across your chest in a spray of blood you didn’t know you had—more pain that doesn’t matter. You snatch his arm on the backswing and twist. It’s like wrangling a cat; Joker seems to turn to liquid as he likes, and he slithers out of your grip until you stomp hard on the back of his knee, buckling his leg. He twists in a whirl of coattails.

The last thing you see before your vision goes black is the flat of his heel flying towards your eye.

You open your eyes. Your gun is lying squarely in your field of vision, the carpet sideways against your line of sight. Joker’s heels slam like death knells along the wood.

You reach for the gun. “No!” Joker’s voice shouts, but it’s too late: It’s in your hand, it’s pointed upwards; Joker reaches for you with one gloved hand and there’s a gunshot. Joker roars and rears back. You can see the black of his jacket through the hole in his palm, and this is the hand you grab, crushing the open wound relentlessly between your fingers until Joker shudders with pain, cross-eyed and gritting his teeth over his whimpers to keep his dignity, still struggling against you.

You slam him to the floor. He fights the entire way down, until you have to wrestle him to the ground and sit on him, point the barrel of the gun at his forehead, dig your fingernails into the bloody hole and peel at the shredded fingerbones inside. Still he doesn’t scream. Blood leaks from between his bared teeth.

“ _Well_?” he snaps.

You’ve got him pinned beneath you, held down by an open wound, gun pointed at his head. You don’t get it. Well, _what_?

“Stop fucking around,” he hisses, like he can read your mind. “If you want something, then _take it from_ —”

You swallow his next words with your mouth. Joker jolts, like he almost hadn’t expected you to really do it, and tries to pull away, but his hair is long and it’s easy to hold his head in place as you drop the gun and pry his jaw open for your tongue. The broken chain around his ankle rattles wildly as his legs scrabble to buck you off. He screams into your mouth as you pin his wounded hand down against the floor with your knee, pull his mouth open further for your hands.

Joker’s mouth is slicker and bloodier than you remember, and much toothier, as he tries to bite your lips, your tongue, anything he can close his jaw around. You’re almost afraid you’re going to make him scream when you pull his hair down to the ground, because it _cannot_ be painless, but all he does is groan into your mouth.

By the time you realize he’s kissing back, there’s only the sound of Joker’s harsh breathing against your cheek and the slick sound of saliva. You shift to kiss him deeper, push your body against him until the two of you can merge, or maybe you can just melt away and become a part of him altogether and you don’t have to worry about your failures or how incorrect you are—but when your weight shifts, Joker’s body seizes.

You can hear the broken bones in his hands crack and grind under your knee. He can’t even yell with your tongue in his mouth. You keep kissing him. Your knee grinds harder into his hand.

When Joker’s control finally breaks, you can taste his scream straight from the throat.

There’s tears across his face when you finally pull away. Joker’s eyes are wide and glazed, his mouth open as he tries to find words, but frankly, you are Goro Akechi and you are an asshole who’s ready to take what he wants and you’re not interested in what he has to say. You get off him and drag him bodily across the floor by the handcuff chains, making him yell wordlessly. By the time you’ve shoved him back on the bed, his wrists aren’t just an angry red, but the cuffs have broken skin and are dripping blood down his forearms.

“Akechi,” Joker gasps. “M—My hand… there’s a healing bead in my bag, if…”

Your eyes narrow. “Why would I want to heal your hand when you’ll just use them to escape all over again?”

“Wait, Akechi, I’m serious… if we don’t heal them now they might not heal right and—”

“—and I’ve half a mind to break your legs, too,” you sneer. “What do you need _those_ for? Running away?”

That’s a good idea—a _great_ idea—that’s exactly the sort of thing that Goro Akechi would do, to take exactly what he wants and accept nothing less.

Joker’s face goes blank.

“No,” Joker says.

“You want this,” you snap back at him.

“I don’t want you to _break my legs_! I need them! I—”

“I’m not going to break your legs,” you say. “I’m going to cut them off.” You pause. “Obviously. Since the point of this is to prevent you running away.”

Joker nearly inflates with fury.

Unfortunately you’ve stopped listening. You scramble back off the bed to the far side of the room and open the drawers, where you’ve stacked water bottles, first aid kits, Joker’s healing supplies, Joker’s Metaverse tools, and, most importantly, Joker’s knife.

It’s too small. You’re going to need something more. Thankfully, you’re already in a side room off the engine room and the rest of your supplies are around here somewhere; but for now, Joker’s knife will just have to be the start.

“—what the fuck makes you think I’d ever love something like you?!” Joker says, sounding angry.

You beam at him. He freezes. “Isn’t this what Goro Akechi would do?”

“He wouldn’t do something like this!”

“How do you know?” you say, and Joker surprisingly falls silent. “Didn’t you say that Akechi would have done anything to achieve his goals? Didn’t he try to kill you? What’s the difference?”

There’s a tense silence, and then: “Goro and I broke up after he tried to kill me,” Joker warns.

You tilt your head. “So what? You still love him.”

“I love _him_. I won’t love _you_.”

You consider that.

Then you flip the knife to the backhanded grip and return to the bed. You lean over him to tilt his chin up. “When I become Akechi,” you say, “you won't have a choice."


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please god read the tags

You’re happy, you think. Insofar as the captain can conceptualize you being happy. Yes—that’s what this feeling is. You’re happy, like anyone would be in your position.

You’re going to be loved.

At last.

*

You wonder if Goro Akechi ever saw Joker cry. You stroke the inside of his thigh. “I have to break the bone now,” you say gently. The raw stump of his other thigh drips healing gel, where you drenched the open muscle and bone with supplies in an attempt to make the wound close faster. You got tired on the second leg, so you had to take the thigh meat out in chunks, like you’d cut down a tree, and now the bone is oddly clean and dry in the open air. Joker tries to breathe quietly despite all the wetness in his throat. His eyelashes are clumped with tears that had crept their way out of him the first time he’d fainted. His hair plastered to his forehead. His eyes are wide and staring at the ceiling. Resistance drains out of him in rivers, leaving behind a dazed hopelessness in his face as reality sinks in. “Shhh,” you say gently, and his hitching breaths actually do quiet for a moment as you slide a strip of his own leather jacket between his teeth. You make sure his leg is properly strapped down to the bed—learning from your mistakes with the first leg, after all—before you line up the chisel and hammer with the femur. “I’ll crack the bone on three.” This time Joker doesn’t spit the leather out. You suppose even someone as rebellious as him learns his lesson about pain after the first amputation. His jaw flexes, clenching down hard. “Just remember that I love you,” you remind him. “One—”

The splitting crack of bone. Joker screams. When his body stops thrashing, you wipe the sweat from his face, whisper that that was perfect, that you still love him. You can’t wait for him to love you back. Even now, not even fully done with the deed, Joker curls around you despite himself when you hold him close, sightless eyes leaking onto your shoulder. “A-he-hi,” he mumbles around the leather bit, like a prayer, like he’s never been more grateful for your soft touches and gentle words. It’s almost like he’s talking to you even with someone else’s name in his mouth. You are certain that Akechi must have never seen this side of Joker before—how precious he is, how jewel-like his onyx eyes are when unguarded and unmasked, how perfect his open wounds and vulnerabilities are in your arms. If Akechi had known how perfect Joker was when he cries, Akechi wouldn’t have gone into the interrogation room with only a gun.

*

At last.

*

Your radio buzzes to life. You watch it from where you’re curled up on Joker’s chest, hands still wet from blood and healing gel. The open wounds make a smell like burning cauterization when exposed to the gel, so thick like cooking meat that you’re glad Joker is unconscious. Placidly, you listen to the radio spit out swear words in Skull’s voice, followed by Queen’s crisp orders.

So Joker told them about the radio you installed for him to contact you.

You kiss Joker’s cheek. “I’ll be back,” you reassure him, even though you’re the one who knocked him out with painkillers.

There’s a lot of clean-up for you to do. You took the jacket off before you started, but your dress shirt and trousers are wrecked beyond repair with the amounts of drying blood that plasters it to your skin. (You’re a little concerned you’ll even be able to get the clothes off, at this point. It was sticky to begin with.) The radio starts blaring again as you head to the social room to pick up a spare outfit.

You settle for the high-necked black shirt of a security guard, looking like you’re either on your way to war or a funeral. The security room has no mirrors, but you know that Arsène has done a number on your face. You pull a pair of black leather gloves over your hands, to cover the burn marks, and go off to head off the vanguard.

It’s a team of four today: Skull, Queen, and— _unfortunately_ —Noir and Fox. The ugly pair lurk over Skull and Queen’s shoulders like a pair of watchdogs.

“I just think that if Joker’s too emotionally compromised,” says Queen, “then there’s a solid case that you are as well, Fox.”

“Just because I strongly dislike Joker being blindly devoted to someone he didn’t know the true self of—who _betrayed_ him—you surely cannot expect me to just stand by.”

Skull scratches his head. Some fool let him carry the radio, and now he’s using the antennae to scratch his dirty monkey scalp. “So like… are you ever gonna talk to someone about what happened with Madarame, or…”

“What does Joker refusing to stand up against someone he loves who betrayed and lied to him have anything to do with Madarame?” Fox snaps.

Noir makes a placating motion with her hand. “This isn’t the time for this. We need Fox here. It’s dangerous for Oracle. We have to do this.”

“Uh, _no_ , we didn’t,” says Skull. “We coulda brought Panther.”

“I just thought a smaller group would be better…”

“At least Panther isn’t like… actively grieving someone. And isn’t all up in Joker’s grill because of it.”

Noir gives him a wide-eyed look. “Noir, we’re _all_ worried about you,” says Skull. “You know that, right? You’ve been going on and on and on about this Akechi thing, and it’s like…” Skull scratches the back of his head. “Man, none of us forgot about your dad, okay. We were just tryna give you space.”

“It’s nothing to do with my father. I’m just worried for Joker! We all are!”

“Yeah, but…” Skull kicks at the ground. “Feels, uh… personal?”

“ _Personal_ doesn’t disqualify her from having an opinion,” says Fox sharply.

Oh, you don’t have time for the Noir pity party. You’re not getting any useful information and it’s all useless teenaged drama. You clear your throat loudly and step into sight. “Can I help you,” you say frostily, in what you consider an impressively cold, Goro-Akechi-esque tone of voice that Joker would be proud of if he could hear it.

All four of them recoil at the sight of you.

“Dude,” says Skull.

Noir has her hand over her mouth. “Your face…!”

You touch your face for the first time. Yes, your skin is peeling like burnt paper, crisp at the edges. If you dig underneath, there’s actually blood and meat there. Curious—this is the captain’s will that gives you flesh—and you find yourself prying, trying to peel off skin altogether to feel the underneath—

“No!” Noir cries. “Oh my god, someone stop it—”

You startle. “Relax,” you say, and reflect that yes, that’s probably for the best, considering that Joker won’t love you if you don’t have this face. You try to smooth the skin back down, like bubbled wallpaper. “I’m fine. What do you want.”

They look floored that you’d even ask the question. (Well, you _know_ why they’re here, but you can’t just _tell_ them you know without admitting your guilt.) “Are you playin’ dumb with us?” Skull asks incredulously. “Look, man, I don’t care what happened to your ugly face. We know it’s you, asshole!”

“Skull—”

“Don’t _tell_ me to calm down! We all know it’s him! Lyin’, backstabbin’, two-faced son-of-a—”

Queen physically covers his mouth with her hand. “ _You’re_ the one who was just lecturing Fox about being too emotional?” she hisses.

You blink at them in distaste. “Am I supposed to know what warranted this,” you say.

“And hell,” Skull says, “everyone knows the _first_ Akechi was a lyin’ piece of shit—!”

“Cognitive Akechi isn’t Akechi,” Fox says.

“It’s the same difference, ain’t it?!”

“Can you tell us what you know?” Noir says, without even a greeting or a segue.

Oh, no. No, you’re not falling for that. “I don’t know what you even expect me to know _about_ ,” you say. “None of you have explained why you’re here.”

Skull opens his fat mouth again. Queen pinches his nose hard. “ _Yeowch_ , ow, effin’ hell is that for…!”

“Joker is missing,” Noir says.

She doesn’t even raise her voice. Less a rock in the storm, more a river stone under a rushing stream. Smooth and unbreakable.

This is a test. You have to take what you want, like Joker wants you to. That’s what Goro Akechi would do: Lie, steal, never let go of what it is that _he_ desires, and smile through the whole thing.

“Missing?” you repeat, with mild surprise. “Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

You raise an eyebrow. “I suppose it’s easy for people to go missing in Tokyo. So was it Hiroyuki?”

Whatever the group was expecting, it stops them in their tracks. “What does Hiroyuki have to do with this?” Fox says warily.

“Well, you put him into power, didn’t you? He’s the new cleaner.” Whether or not that affects the palace—which it _won’t_ , because that would endanger the captain—it’s definitely the case that the Phantom Thieves of Heart ensured Hiroyuki’s rise to power. Joker himself confirmed it. “You would think that a new cleaner would go about cleaning the captain’s unfinished affairs. You would think that the leader of the Phantom Thieves still being alive is an affair to be finished.”

The Thieves look at each other. “And besides,” you say with a shrug. “Even if it wasn’t the cleaner, what do you expect me to do about it? People go missing in Tokyo every day.”

Fox raises an arm before Skull can speak. “We believe he didn’t go missing in Tokyo.”

“According to who?”

“Well…” Noir looks uncertainly at Queen. “Mona-chan said that Joker gave him to Oracle for the night…”

You cross your arms. This, you think, is going to be easy. “And this proves?”

Noir hesitates. She always does that: The second she’s called out about her faulty logic, she folds like a stack of cards. Typical, of a woman to speak her mind without thinking it through.

“Was this somehow _unusual_ behavior for Joker?” you prompt.

“…No,” Skull says, after a moment. He sounds kind of surprised. “He does that a lot. He’s gotta give the cat the slip to go off to places to do shady shit and all.”

“There you have it,” you say calmly, as if you know the first thing they’re talking about with regards to cats and what Mona has to do with them. “He went off to some corner of Tokyo, and—"

“ _No_ ,” Skull says, just as Fox and Noir open their mouths. “We know where he was goin’! Where he was _really_ goin’!”

Oh, so they’re going to continue to accuse you despite obviously not having any proof. You see how this is. You take it back: Typical, of a group of teenagers to act first and think never.

“We’re concerned that he came to see you,” says Noir politely.

Your own smile feels real on your face. “Why? Just because he came to see me once?”

“ _Yeah_?” Skull says, like it should be obvious. “Dude, he was so cut up and everything, that’s exactly the kind of dumbass thing he’d do.”

“Even though he promised Noir that he wouldn’t return alone?” you ask.

Even Fox looks surprised at that. “He promised you that?” Queen asks curiously.

“We… talked about it. I don’t know if he promised anything.”

You give an exaggerated shrug. “Well, _I_ recall him saying he wouldn’t enter the Metaverse alone again, and believe me, I would have noticed if he came to see me,” you say. You let a touch of real irritation creep into your voice. “I’ve been doing nothing but waiting for him to come back since you all left.”

“You really expect us to believe—?!” Skull begins, before Fox holds up his katana.

You put your nose in the air. “Insofar as I’m concerned, it’s _you_ who lost Joker. You were the ones in Tokyo with him at the time he disappeared. And I won’t forgive you if anything happened to him.”

“Alright,” says Noir quietly. She turns to Fox and whispers something in his ear; he has to bend down almost comedically while she gets on her toes. You hear something about _Oracle_ and _location_. You don’t miss the way Queen and Skull flank Noir—it wasn’t that Noir was lurking behind Queen and Skull, but that Queen and Skull were standing between her and you. When she nods, the rest of the group nods with her. “That’s all we need to know,” she tells you.

“I hope you find him quickly,” you tell her coldly.

Noir gives you the long, heavy look of someone resigned to her last resort. “Me, too,” she says. And then the group turns as a unit and marches away into the other reality without so much as a goodbye.

You’re confident that this is something Goro Akechi would do.

Joker will be so pleased.

*

Joker is a perfect sight, naked on the mattress, the cuffs still secure and gleaming around his wrists. He closes his eyes quickly and turns his head away when you enter the room. You feel almost nauseous with love.

“I brought you some food,” you say softly. Real steak, with a proper fork and steak knife, and even a bit of wine. Again, you’re not really sure if the restaurant serves anything that isn’t upscale. Joker doesn’t respond either way. “I don’t know if humans can digest cognitive food, but maybe it’ll help with the hungry feeling. Are you hungry?”

No response.

You remember Joker’s orders: no rhetorical questions. When Akechi wanted an answer, he got an answer. When Joker finally opens his eyes, you are looming over the tiny cot, and you are waiting for a real response, this time, because you are remembering what it is that Joker wants and who Akechi was, and you meant what you said when you promised you’d become Goro Akechi.

“Answer me,” you say. It’s a statement.

His eyes have an odd black smudge beneath them, and you’re not sure if it’s an effect of having been in the cognitive world so long, having gotten his Persona ripped apart, having been drained at zero magic, or from—you know—the blood loss. It’s only when his eyes flicker past you that you remember that you never actually bothered to dispose of his legs, and they’re still draped over a chair like a shirt you’ve forgotten to put in the laundry.

And then he just turns his head away. Tilts his head up and squeezes his jaw shut.

Amazing, a part of you thinks without a trace of irony. He’s chained down, without hope, having lost so much already, and still he finds ways to resist. Even if it’s just by doing nothing at all.

The other part of you wants to crawl into his lap and beg for him to tell you what you’ve done wrong.

No—you can’t—that’s not what Goro Akechi would do, so instead you drop the tray of food on the ground next to the cot and lean over him, pry his face up off the shit mattress to look at you. He doesn’t even close his eyes, just looks away, like you’re not even worth making eye contact with.

“What?” you say harshly. “What is it?”

Joker wrenches his chin out of your grip and turns his face away again.

Your fingers clench in frustration. “This is what you _wanted_.”

No response, except the slightest, faintest sneer on Joker’s face. Somehow, the dark circles under his eyes only get deeper.

How do you make someone love you? You can argue with him like Akechi. You can fight and hurt him like Akechi. But how do you make someone hand their heart over? It’s not something you can take at gunpoint like a wallet. How do you make someone love you by force—short of changing the captain’s cognition to alter their entire make-up, of course.

“Do you need me to insist some more? Do you need me to wrench it out of you?” you say. Your voice barely sounds human, it’s clogged so full of frustration and vicious edges. “Do you somehow need me to be _even more_ forceful? Am I supposed to sit here while you make up your mind about whether or not I’m enough of Akechi for you?”

Joker’s eyes tilt upwards, like he can’t wait for you to stop. You snarl like an animal and grab his head with both hands, but it only makes him wince from pain and disgust. “Do you think this little hard-to-get game is _funny_?”

All you get is more silence.

This isn’t _working_. He _said_ that he wanted you to be more forceful, to take what you wanted, and then he’d love you if you were just more like Akechi, and still—despite everything—

You shove your mouth against his. He bites instantly on your lip until you yelp and pull away.

Even through his exhaustion, even naked and covered in sweat and tears and his own blood from his missing legs, his grin is wide and satisfied and covered in your blood.

You grab him by the throat—he snaps his jaws at your wrist, but he can’t quite reach from his angle—and drag him closer to you on the bed. “I’m willing to do everything for you,” you seethe. “I’m willing to tear myself apart from the inside out—!”

His arms go taut. Something in his wrists crack with how hard you’ve pulled and he screams shortly, but still that look of hard-eyed hatred in his face doesn’t change. His chest muscles are lean under his skin, his nipples moving gently with each harsh breath he takes.

“—to replace everything about me, to pull out the parts of me that are wrong for _you_ ,” you mutter. “The details, the behaviors, my image—just so you would want me around—I’m willing to _be someone else entirely_ if it means you’ll love me! What fucking more do you want?!”

When all you get is more stony-eyed silence—you’re not sure that you think, really, before you lean down and bite hard around his nipple.

He jerks and yells immediately. How satisfying to finally get a _single fucking reaction_ out of him. You bite down harder with your jaw, really make sure to get the mark in his skin until his voice turns high and shocked, and then lave the wound with your tongue.

“Get _off_!” he roars. The same deep timbre he uses to give orders. But even as he tries to buck you off, it’s child’s play to pin his chest to the mattress and keep him down with your weight, your thighs squeezing just above where his legs used to be until his whole body shakes with the pain.

“Don’t touch me, I’ll cut your god damn hands off—”

You don’t bother responding. You’re on the right track now, and you’re not letting it go. You press more biting kisses along his chest with an inexperience that makes your own teeth hurt, trail your fingers into the dips and curves of his stomach muscles. There’s just the tiniest bit of hair along his navel—the sort of scruff that a skinny teenaged boy would have—that tickles your hands and makes him bare his teeth. “I said _stop_!”

“Shut up,” you say. He’s the one who told you to be more forceful. Take what you want. If Joker wants you to be independent so fucking bad, then this is what he’ll get. “Obviously you can’t make up your mind about what you want, so I’ll have to make it up for you.”

“ _I want you to stop touching me_ ,” Joker snarls. “I want you to—”

You are not listening. You also have your hand around his dick, which is unfortunately still soft, but you suppose the point of this exercise is to change that. “ _Get off me_ ,” Joker says. He doesn’t sound angry anymore. He sounds choked and scared.

All it takes to unravel a person is to get him by the balls, apparently. This isn’t right, for Joker’s control to fall apart in your hands. It should be _you_ falling apart under his iron heel. But if this is what Joker wanted… His eyes go huge, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing, as you open your mouth and lick around the base experimentally.

It’s almost too easy, once you have your lips on his dick. He hardens in your mouth long before his anger turns to begging you to get off him, which turns to more silence. You pull your mouth off only once to say, “You do want it after all,” like an accusation. His face is screwed up into an expression of pain, but you recognize that deep red flush across his neck and cheeks. He holds very still and breathes little. You wonder if he’s imagining he’s somewhere else, or with someone else.

Then finally, _finally_ , Joker makes a little noise that might be pleasure and you double down, drooling unceremoniously with the exertion of trying to finally be worth someone using you. Joker gasps. “Ah—ah,” his voice says, and you’re _almost certain_ he’d been about to say _Akechi_ , but then more soft noises drip out of his mouth, softer than you ever thought anyone could ever sound like during sex. Like a woman? Like a man? Not quite shy but low and quiet, warm in your ears—

“Akechi,” he murmurs, and you are—overjoyed? In despair? _He’s calling someone else’s name_ —no, Akechi _is_ your name, technically—“ngh, ah, Akechi…”

Doesn’t matter. You exist for what Joker wants. When you close your eyes and suck hard, you can feel his groan from his chest. “Fuck, untie my hands, please…”

You pull off. “So you can try and escape again?”

“Just one hand,” he begs. He doesn’t look at you. His eyes are shut tight, pinched at the corners like he’s thinking hard about something else.

You narrow your eyes.

Joker breathes shallowly, like he’s steeling himself. “I want to touch you too.”

Fuck. Okay. Maybe just one. You undo one side, hesitate over his face—decide against trying to kiss him for now—and dutifully return to his cock, except this time Joker’s hand trails along the back of your head to push you down. His fingers winding their way into your hair is a relief like cool water. You close your eyes, will yourself to get hard or feel something—no, it’s no use. You’ll have to fake it. You don’t mind at all; it’ll be better this way, easier to fake whatever Akechi would have done. The pleasure of being usable for Joker’s wishes will have to be enough.

Your eyes are still closed as you pull up for air. You pant hard, try to swallow around the messy spit still dripping from your tongue so you can ask if you’re doing well, if this is what Akechi would have done, if this is what Joker wanted, when the flat end of a knife slides into your mouth.

Is this just what sex with Joker is going to be like? He did peel your bleeding skin off your back after he slept with you the first time. You open your eyes.

“You shouldn’t have untied my hand,” Joker says coldly.

The steak knife from the food tray is jammed into the back of your throat. It’s already so far back that you can’t move without it pricking something; if you ran for it, he’d obviously just gut you through the mouth like a fish. You feel blood well up in your tongue. The tip doesn’t tickle your gag reflex, since you don’t have one, but you know that it should.

Clever. The knife meant for eating used against someone’s throat might not kill them instantly, but even a dull or messy blade can kill someone if shoved through the open mouth. After all, it connects directly to the spine and, at the right angle, the brain.

You probably should have realized that Joker changed his tune about being willing a little too fast.

Slowly, the knife slides another quarter inch into your throat. You carefully do not swallow. You’re still dripping spit on his stomach. Joker’s eyes watch your utter stillness, the whites of his eyes wild against the dark mess of his hair.

“You were a mistake,” Joker rasps.

There’s nothing you can do. You don’t have your gun. If you grab for his arm, he’ll just spear you through the spinal cord (provided that you have one). You can’t even move backwards under his focus, intense upon every movement of your face, every suppressed swallow from your throat. You can feel the blade in your throat growing damp with your breath.

“You always were a monster with his skin. But now I won’t regret killing you.”

Blood drips down the hollow of your tongue. It slides back into your own throat.

“Even if you’re almost like him,” Joker’s voice says quietly.

The tip of the knife tilts down, pressing flat until you have no choice but to open your jaw wider. Blood leaks between your teeth and down your chin.

And you’re trying not to be mad—you’re trying to be good—you’re trying to be whatever Joker needs and whatever he wants to use and you’ll let him kill you if he must but you didn’t even get the chance when you are _so sure_ that you could become Goro Akechi if he just let you _try_ , you’re _certain_ you can be everything he missed about Goro Akechi and more, you could really make him love you, and you feel your own blood slipping out between your bottom teeth to soak your lip and you think that if he’s going to jam this knife up through the back of your mouth and into your brain then you’re going to make the metal scrape along every inch of your teeth on the way up.

The blade is warm against your teeth when you bite down. Joker’s eyes focus along the delicate cuts in your lips.

 _Do it_ , you think, baring your teeth around the knife. You lock eyes with him and tell him with your eyes: _If you think you can_.

You’ll fight anyone who tries to take you away from Joker—even him.

Pink spit slides down the handle of the knife, dripping along his bare hands. You’ve seen Joker beg _Don’t say that with his voice_ , say _I hate you_ like he’s only got himself to convince.

He won’t kill you.

He _can’t_ kill you.

_He’s no better than you._

You hold his eyes and slowly lean down, like you’re still blowing his cock, to impale your throat on the tip of his knife.

He pulls the knife away so fast it slices the corner of your lip. Disoriented, you’re too busy checking to see if Joker’s ruined Goro Akechi’s face to notice before Joker grabs you by the throat, twists as best as he can pushing himself up on his leg stumps, and shoves you down on the bed, knife upraised.

You just look at him with disdain. The knife drips onto your face—onto Goro Akechi’s face. The sheer fury in Joker’s eyes drips in tears down the sleepless, dark hollows of his cheeks.

The knife drops and sinks point-first into the mattress by your ear.

“Fuck,” Joker gasps. “I can’t… I…”

You nod. “I know.”

Joker buries his face in his hands. “Shut up!”

“I do know.” If there is _anything_ you know, it’s the things you can’t do.

“I miss you,” Joker whispers into his palms. His voice is taut and thick.

You reach up. You cradle his face in your hands, pull him closer to you. He doesn’t pull away. “I love you,” you say, the only thing of any power you can think to say.

His face is wet on your shoulder. You hope that you smell like Akechi. “I miss you so much,” Joker says against your skin.

“I love you,” you say again, waiting for love to change his life completely in the same way it did for you, for him to stop crying, for you to understand why _I love you_ is not enough, but it doesn’t, and he doesn’t, and you don’t.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> incredibly impressed that people are still reading after all that... thank u all for ur incredible comments 💕

You don’t understand Joker at all.

He wants to be pushed and told no; he wants you to listen to him; he wants you kiss him like you hate him; he wants you to hate him like you love him. All you’ve learned is that you don’t know anything and probably never will, but you seem to have gotten what you wanted anyway.

Joker is quiet, now. He yanks his hands away when you try to put them back in their cuffs, but this time you don’t push, and he doesn’t mock you for going along with what he wants.

You stay like this for some time. The steak knife is still point down in the mattress. The black marks under Joker’s eyes are getting deeper. His breaths come slower, pushed in and out deliberately through his mouth, like he has to remind himself to hold still and make himself breathe.

When you skim your fingers across his shoulders, he doesn’t push you away.

“I don’t understand you,” you tell him quietly.

He gives you a tired look, but distantly, as if from a thousand miles away. For some reason, the corner of his lips turn up, although his eyes don’t crinkle at the corners.

“It’s not funny,” you tell him.

“I didn’t say it was funny.” Joker’s voice is so soft that you have to learn in to hear him. “That’s just something Goro used to say.”

You can’t stop yourself in time. “Tell me what he would do,” you beg.

Joker goes silent again.

 _Please need me_ , you want to say.

He’s quiet but in a way like he’s just run out of words. Or maybe he’s running out of blood; it really could be both. You practically crawl into the bed with him, trying to pull your knees up to fit in besides him, desperate to be close. “Aren’t I useful to you? I can do anything. I can be anything. I really can become him. Just tell me how.”

Joker is still quiet. Thinking, now. Slowly, he tilts his face towards you on the pillow, and you wish that you didn’t have such awkward limbs so that you could sink into him face-first, cut off all the parts of you that think too much or too little or do literally anything that he doesn’t like so you can just lean your head to the side to mirror the tilt of Joker’s neck and let him swallow you whole.

He takes a breath. Then:

“Once, I accidentally cut myself while helping in the kitchen. I was…”

He has to take another breath. His eyes go in and out of focus.

(How many days has he been in the Metaverse? When was the last time he ate? Does he need a blood transfusion?)

“…I was showing off,” he manages. “And… Goro was behind the counter… watching me cook. I’m good with twirling pencils and cell phones and coins and things with my fingers… and I figured, how different can a knife be from a cell phone… and… um. It was different. And he laughed at me for ten minutes about it…”

You frown. “Do you want me to laugh at you?”

Joker’s mouth goes lopsided. “No.”

“Oh.”

“At the time… I was being cocky. He wasn’t going to… let me live it down. But even with all that, he made me put the food away… even though he hadn’t eaten that day… and we went upstairs and cleaned the wound…”

Oh. Right, yes, you put the healing gel on the place where his legs used to be but you never wrapped it. “Do you want me to…?”

“He wouldn’t ask,” says Joker tiredly. “I told him… I could wrap it myself. But he insisted.”

Alright. This, you can do.

You lift his wounded leg gently. For some reason, after everything that you’ve done, after that entire fight between the two of you, the soft touch is what makes him flinch. There’s no blood anymore due to the healing gel, but the skin is still shiny and pink, stretched so thin over the open muscle that you swear it could break like an eggshell. You coat your fingers first in another layer of gel and reach for him, but he pulls away instinctively.

You stop. “Am I supposed to insist?”

Slowly, Joker nods.

Joker looks like the last thing he wants to be doing is giving orders right now. You need to be better at anticipating what Akechi would have done. What do you know? A little bossy, no nonsense, but still concerned enough to make sure that Joker got the medical attention he needed. Is that what Joker wants?

“Was he gentle?” you ask softly.

He gives a tiny nod.

As exhausted as he looks, he doesn’t take his eyes off you as you pull out the bandages and carefully lift the stump into your lap. He tries to lift it himself, but you shake your head, stroke Akechi’s hand along his thigh reassuringly. “Let me,” you say with Akechi’s straightforward voice. The sort of tone that brooks no argument, but just a little fond underneath.

It’s like a magic spell. Joker breathes easier. His eyelashes dip at a drunkenly slow pace as Akechi’s fingers peel away the blanket, Akechi’s thumb traces the little cuts and bruises he’s acquired. “Just relax,” Akechi’s voice says, and Joker does, just like that. The sound of gauze ripping is sudden and loud and makes Joker flinch, despite the fact that he’s gone through much more than a sharp noise, and it’s only when Akechi’s face frowns with concern that he tries to breathe easier.

You hesitate, and then press Akechi’s lips to the inside of Joker’s thigh, a few inches away from the edge of the stump. He shudders.

Carefully, the gauze makes its way around Joker’s opened thighs, immediately dyed an unpleasant red from the healing gel that makes you think of thinned-out blood. “It hurts,” Joker says suddenly, like he just blurted it out without thinking at all, and that admission makes him—for some reason—blush.

“I know,” Akechi’s voice says. “But you still have to.”

“’Kay,” Joker mumbles. “Don’t stop… if I pass out…”

“Are you tired?”

“Mm.”

You think about it. “You need water first.”

“Goro,” Joker murmurs.

Akechi’s hands cup his face gently to tilt his head up and give him water in careful sips. He shakes his head to the food. You hesitate over any of the healing drinks, wary of accidentally healing him too much and enabling Joker to escape, and eventually you settle for just water. Then you do the other leg: The same ceremony of tearing the gauze, wrapping from the wounded end and making your way up towards the mid-thigh, careful not to brush his exposed penis with Akechi’s hands. You catch him watching you through his slitted eyelids, and you stare back through Akechi’s eyelashes.

“You didn’t stop,” he murmurs, when you’re done.

“I told you I wouldn’t. You think I don’t keep my word?”

Joker smiles, then.

Still, he looks utterly exhausted. You curl up against him, cradling his head in Akechi's arms, Akechi's grip loose across his neck. He looks like he can’t even keep his eyes open. “Goro,” he murmurs.

“I love you,” you say with Akechi’s voice. Weakly, Joker closes the tiny distance between your faces to press a kiss to Akechi’s lips and, for once, he doesn’t tell you not to say it.

You cannot tell at which exact moment he disappeared into sleep, but you can tell that he does not dream. After a moment, without anyone to tell you you’re not allowed, you lie down next to him, staring down at his face and finding no answers in his sleeping expression. You draw closer. Without his legs in the way, he fits perfectly into the curve of your body.

*

Between Joker’s coaching, the captain’s understanding of your need to please, and Akechi’s photographs, you are almost lifelike. You are so close, now. You are virtually certain that if you are not Goro Akechi now, then you could be, and you’ll finally figure out what it means to be him. Joker’s hand is warm around yours, his bare arm across your stomach. There is so much skin and so much of it is pressed up against you.

You are luxuriating in your new progress to become usable to Joker when he asks against your shoulder, “Why did you kill him?”

You hadn’t even realized he was awake. But you don’t flinch. “He hesitated,” you reply. “He could have taken the shot at any time and killed you before you knew what hit you while all of you were crawling around the ship. He was explicitly ordered to take you out. Obviously, he didn’t follow through on his orders.”

Joker’s silence is deafening. Now that you know what you know about Akechi’s relationship with Joker, you presume Akechi had been watching what he couldn’t have. You turn your head to face him. Without his mask, Joker really has the prettiest doe eyes, the irises dark and demure and the lashes thick around the clean whites of his eyes. (Like a woman’s, you guess. You don’t have much other frame of reference for beauty besides the captain’s perspective. Maybe you see why Akechi was so taken with him.)

“There was no other alternative reasons to hesitate rather than disloyalty and lack of conviction,” you say, when Joker doesn’t say anything. “I decided that I’d finish the job for him.”

“…He hesitated,” Joker repeats dully, like that’s the only thing you’ve said that he heard.

“He didn’t want to kill you.”

“I would never have…” His voice trails off. It’s so soft, it’s barely more than a breath. “…never have guessed he’d do something… like that.”

Joker doesn’t say anything after this for a long moment. You weather Joker’s silence dutifully. You guess he’s thinking about Akechi again, which, you suppose, is his right. It does make you feel like you haven’t done your job right, if he’s thinking about Akechi so soon after you thought you were finally getting the hang of being useful to him.

You’re just thinking that maybe you should show some initiative, really take it to heart what Joker said about Akechi being a little bit pushy and taking what he wanted and maybe just insisting that you fuck him, when you notice Joker’s thumb rubbing across the back of your hand. “He… had a scratch here,” he says.

Your hand is unblemished, naturally. The captain must not have known about the scratch. “Like a wound?”

“Mm… I think he’d… brushed something… the edge of a sharp table… and it left… a cut there, and it hadn’t healed before… the last time we saw each other…”

Joker’s eyes close, for so long that you think they won’t reopen. When they do, you can barely see them part. “He kept… wearing his gloves over it… and it didn’t get any air… like I said it wouldn’t…”

“You can just say _I told you so_ ,” you reply.

Joker’s lip tilts up again. “…I told you so.”

“What did it look like?”

Joker’s thumbnail scrapes gently across your skin, tracing the line, but too gentle to leave a permanent mark. You shiver.

“Like that,” he says quietly.

“Jagged? Or clean?”

He blinks blankly. “…Clean?”

You shift away from him, squirm your shoulder out from under his weight. You reach over to your clothes and pull out Joker's knife. You hold your hand still on your thigh. Put the point of the knife into your skin, imagine the line that Joker traced where you can still feel it, and without hesitation, you slide the knife point through the skin to make the mark.

“Like this?” you say, holding it up when you’re done.

You don’t know what Joker’s face looks like in that moment. He stares down at the knife, still rimed with red.

“I tried to be exact,” you say, a little anxiously. “I thought it’d be easier than telling the captain in the other reality about it. I’m sure that would have been more authentic, to have the captain change his cognition, but—”

“It’s… great,” says Joker heavily. “…Thanks.”

 _Anything for you_ , you want to say, but that doesn’t seem to be something that Akechi would have said. Joker seems to expect a little more… bite to Akechi’s fondness. A little more self-assertion. Determined to stay true to what Joker’s coaching on how to emulate him, you take his hand with authority. The wound beads and begins to leak between your fingers, squeezed out when Joker holds you back.

You are going to die. You’ll die happy, too. You think, for the first time, that you might die having done something else of importance other than being useful to the captain, which is impossible, and yet here you are. Joker’s fingers lace through yours. He holds you tightly, so that your palm is pressed flat against his. With his wounded hand, he skims the tips of his fingers along your wrist, delicate where the gunshot in his palm is still fresh. You are almost loved.


	13. Chapter 13

The next day—insofar as days really pass here with the captain’s internal sense of time—you wake up to the best morning of your life. Joker is asleep and warm in your bed, and there are dark, sunken hollows beneath his eyes, and his lips are dry and his breath is thin. He is holding you tightly in his sleep.

“Do you want breakfast,” you whisper, since breakfast in bed is the sort of thing that the captain always liked in the morning after from anyone he fucked.

Joker does not respond.

You squirm out of the cot from under him, bothering him as little as possible, and pull a protein bar and some soda out of his supplies. He’s barely responsive as you feed it to him in bites, until you change tactics and give him a can of soda and a healing drink, which goes easily down his throat.

How much food and water can you give him without enacting the healing properties of food items and making him strong enough to overpower you? It’s better to keep him weak. You don’t want to heal him _too_ much. When you change the dressings on his legs, the skin is mostly healed over. It’s only the dark smudges under his eyes that seem… off.

“How do you feel?” you say softly.

Joker doesn’t respond to that either.

You frown. Then you put his wrists back in their cuffs, bolt him to the wall, and drop a kiss along his forehead, for good luck and a good day.

*

You make your way quickly through the engine room and the maintenance shafts, working your way upwards from the depths of the ship to the surface, and then wait impatiently at the restaurant while they prepare a gigantic box of food to go. (Honestly, you think it’s time that you moved Joker to a more traditional bedroom. That way you can have room service, at least.) You’ll take your bets with cognitive food. At the very least, it might be less risky than healing Joker outright.

You’re almost surprised to find the cognitive food is warm through the cardboard box in your hands, and you are wondering if your own body is warm to the touch when you cross by the entrance to the captain’s room and nearly run directly into Fox and Noir.

Thankfully, they have their backs turned to you as they study the door, and are deep in conversation, so you disappear behind a corner without a sound. “When you found out that Madarame betrayed you…” Noir is saying, so quietly that you have to strain your ears to hear.

“You couldn’t have paid me to speak to him, let alone go back to that atelier.” Fox looks at the door, like it’s a proper conversation partner in this discussion. “But if someone had said, Kitagawa, instead of going back to the atelier where Madarame had done all those terrible things and used you, you could go to some alternative reality where Madarame was a good person and a good teacher… Ultimately, that was what I wanted, wasn’t it? I didn’t necessarily want to return to Madarame. I wanted to go back to the reality I lived in when I believed Madarame was a good person.”

“Maybe I mourned who I thought my father was,” says Noir.

“Perhaps. But when it comes to Joker, we always knew Akechi was a traitor. It’s not like it came as a surprise.”

“Maybe we knew. Did Joker know? Obviously he knew in his head, but did he really understand it in his heart?”

“When did you finally understand that Madarame was just using you?”

Fox doesn’t respond right away. “It took a while,” is all he says, eventually.

“Yes.”

“And then it took an even longer while after that.”

“Yes.”

“I wish Joker were here.”

“He’d know what to say, wouldn’t he?”

“With frightening precision. He’s a master at his art, although I haven’t the faintest clue what that art is. It’s rotten that he’s helped us through so much, and now that it’s time to return the favor, we can’t even find him, let alone find the right words to say.”

Noir sighs, rests her cheek in her hand. “I feel a bit like a cat owner who’s lost her cat… I’m so worried because he could be in trouble… but knowing Joker, it’s more likely he’ll come back in two weeks with half a dozen dead birds on our doorstep, and I’ll just feel like an idiot for worrying.”

“It doesn’t matter either way, now. We’ll have to find him whether or not he wants to be found. The election’s around the corner and the fifth lock is back in working order.”

—it’s in _what_?

When Noir bends down to get her axe, you can see the door clearly: All five locks in a neat row, and _opened_.

Not only had their plan to replace the previous cleaner with Hiroyuki _worked_ , but they’d gone ahead and gotten a letter of recommendation from Hiroyuki’s cognition.

“Well, I suppose the cognitive world is even stranger than we thought…” Noir says, like a mockery of the thoughts that you should probably be having, were you really capable of thinking right now.

“Creating a new cleaner to open the same lock was a magnificent idea. Don’t sell yourself short.”

If the door is open—if you have to protect the captain at all costs—if Joker—

—does this mean you’ll have to kill Joker?

You bolt for Joker’s room.

“Who’s there?” a voice calls behind you, but you don’t look back.

*

Before he died, did Akechi struggle knowing that he’d have to kill Joker on Shido’s orders? Did he replay all his actions leading up to this moment, wondering where he went wrong, what he could have done differently; and did he play all the futures possible from here, what possible world in which everyone lives?

Fortunately, you are better than such melodramatic overthinking. The point of you is to get things done.

When you burst into the side room you’re keeping Joker in, Joker’s eyes sluggishly track you as you scramble to prepare your gun and find the key to the door—not that your security was necessarily bad, but it was meant to keep Joker inside, rather than keep people out. Now you’ll have to do both. And ideally, nobody would ever find Joker at all, but you’d really meant for this place to be out of the way of the other cognitions, not Phantom Thieves dedicated to finding their leader. Do you need magazines? You don’t really run out of bullets, since the captain doesn’t care about those sorts of logistics…

You barely realize he’s speaking until he’s said your name more than once: “Goro…? What’s…”

“Don’t worry about it,” you say with confidence. Nothing you have to fake, even; the whole point of you is that you’re capable of doing your jobs, and you have no doubt that you’ll be able to fulfill this one as well. Having a straight-forward mission means no mistakes, no confusion, no hesitation. All this time spent waffling over what Joker does or doesn’t want is a thing of the past. The objective now is clearly to keep Joker away from his friends, to keep the captain safely separated from the Phantom Thieves, and to keep Joker alive. All of this is easily accomplished if Joker stays here, does not leave, and does not interact with the captain in any way.

Zero conflict of interest. You can have Joker love you _and_ serve the captain as you were meant to.

Joker acts like you hadn’t said anything at all, from the way he continues to try and sit up—or maybe he didn’t hear you, or can’t hear you. He moves like an old man. Briskly, you drop your tool bag and stand over him, tilting his head up towards you without thinking about how rude this is and how the captain would gut you instantly if you ever behaved this way with him. Joker’s pupils take a whole second to focus. He needs more blood, maybe. Not everyone exists purely on the captain’s will, alcohol, praise, and TV ratings. How much has the cognitive laws of the Metaverse been sustaining him? If you did a blood transfusion with him, would that hurt him or kill him?

“Joker?” you say.

“Mm. What’re you doing…?”

“I’m keeping you safe,” you say.

“Goro wouldn’t do that,” Joker says thickly.

“I am Goro Akechi. I’m keeping you safe.”

With the way you’re cupping his face, you can feel his pulse in his neck, surprisingly strong for how he struggles to even sit upright after all the blood loss, limb loss, and minimal food and water. The brilliant, velvet dark of his irises has gone thin and grey, filmed over and watered down.

And for the first time, you pause.

Joker cannot die, otherwise he won’t love you anymore. Can you even keep him here, logistically, if you can’t feed him real food or water?

What if he insists on stealing the captain’s treasure? Will he cease to love you if you stop him?

Will he cease to love you if he’s barely a shell of himself?

If Joker becomes someone else entirely because of what you did to him to make him love you, does that mean “Joker” will die?

“You have to stay who you are,” you tell him. “I cannot allow you to change.”

Joker’s eyebrows begin to pinch together. “Why not…?”

If there is anything you know about Goro Akechi, it is that he existed purely to serve others. If there is anything you know about yourself, it is that you need Joker to love you. But just as you open your mouth, the grates on the catwalk above rattle and bang.

“You said that… to me before,” Joker says, with a sudden sharpness in his voice, an alertness in his eyes that wasn’t there before, although something must still be off because you’ve never said anything of the sort to him. “Why… can’t you allow me to change…?”

Too late. You narrow your eyes, unsurprised, to see Noir and Fox drop gracefully from the ceiling in the corner of your vision.

You don’t raise your gun, but only for Joker’s sake. You click the safety off and keep it in your hand as Noir covers her mouth in horror, staring through the open door into the room you’ve been keeping Joker. Before either one of them can speak, you say, “You aren’t welcome here.”

Fox makes a slight retching noise into his arm. Noir drops her axe on accident.

You remember that you’ve _still_ forgotten to clean up the blood, bits of bone fragments, and the remains of Joker’s legs.

“Noir…?” Joker says faintly.

“Oh my god,” she says, almost inaudible, in her itty-bitty high-pitched squeaky doll voice that Noir loves so much.

You’ve decided you’re not waiting around to see what will happen. You pull out your gun and point it at them through the open doorway. “ _Leave_.”

“Don’t worry, Joker,” Noir says, like you hadn’t even spoken. “We’ll… we’ll get you out of there. We’ll save you, I promise…”

“He’s here on his own will,” you say coldly. “You’re interfering.”

Fox, like Noir, acts like you haven’t even spoken. “Should we call for back-up…? We need more people than a team of two, we don’t even have a navigator…”

“Don’t bring Oracle here,” Joker says hoarsely.

But when you turn to him, his eyes have shut. He might have passed out, honestly. Noir’s mouth is set like a little girl trying to be braver than she is. “If we leave now, who knows where the cognition will take him.”

 _The cognition_. You don’t even have the honor of being First Name Cognitive, Last Name Akechi.

“We have to act now,” Noir continues.

“We don’t even have healing supplies—!”

So they’re under-equipped.

“We have to act _now_ ,” Noir says. “With the door to the treasure open, it’ll make its move any day—”

“I’m not going to _kill_ him,” you say, a little offended. Fox jolts a bit, like he’s forgotten you can talk. “The entire point of this is to keep him alive and safe.”

“You’re insane,” says Fox.

That’s a fairly human measurement of mental faculties. You won’t go insane unless the captain requires it of you—or until they change his cognition of Akechi again. (Either that, or you’ve been insane since the first moment they changed the captain’s cognition of Akechi, and nobody, including yourself, has noticed until just now.) “I’m entirely rational,” you say anyway, rather than explain this. “So long as he doesn’t act against the captain, I can guarantee to you Joker’s safety.”

And you are going to guarantee that he doesn’t act against the captain.

Fox opens his mouth, but Noir puts a hand on his arm and shakes her head. “It can’t be reasoned with,” she says, which is cute coming from such an unreasonable bitch. And then she turns to you: “Either you get out of our way, or we remove you.”

Fury bubbles up again in Akechi’s chest—because isn’t that _typical_ Noir, assuming that she can make decisions on Joker’s behalf, appointing her will above his, assuming she has the right to make decisions for not just herself, but for him, too, and frankly she’s being _terribly_ bold for someone with a gun pointed directly at her and you know Joker will be mad at you if you kill his team but you feel Akechi’s finger squeezing around the trigger—

“No!” says Joker suddenly.

You stop. Noir and Fox go still.

Joker’s eyes are barely open, like the light hurts him. Or maybe they’re just dry from lack of water. He shakes his head slowly. “Please…”

“Joker, don’t push yourself—!”

“…don’t hurt him,” says Joker quietly.

Fox physically recoils. “What kind of Stockholm syndrome…?”

You don’t take your finger off the trigger, but when Joker reaches a hand out, you take it gladly and wind Akechi’s hand around his palm. You watch Noir’s eyes go narrow. You have the urge to slam the door in her face and lock her out. “Goro already died once,” Joker says heavily.

“And he’ll only die once,” says Noir quietly. “This isn’t Akechi.”

Joker closes his eyes. You would have thought he’d gone unconscious again if not for the strength of his grip—barely there, but firm nonetheless.

“Akechi betrayed you, attempted to murder you, and then died of his own mistakes,” Noir goes on, in that same steady, even tone. “He is _gone_ , Joker—”

“So what?” Joker says suddenly. The words come out of him with more force of will than air; he seems to shrink like it physically took something out of him to say it.

“So no matter what the cognition does, no matter how it changes to imitate him, this thing will never _be_ him. You told me yourself that I had to let go of my father!”

“You got to tell him goodbye,” Joker says.

Noir stiffens. “Just because I turned against my father in his palace doesn’t mean that I was ready to _bury_ him!”

Fox’s thumb pushes his katana out of its sheath. “You’re not making rational decisions. You need immediate medical attention and rest—”

You realize Akechi’s grip is painful around Joker’s when he yelps and everyone else jumps. “And when I disappear,” you say, “I should leave Joker in the care of two traitors who think they can manipulate Joker and betray his wishes?”

“Do you hear yourself?” Noir says. “ _Us_? Manipulate and betray him? After what you’ve done…!”

“I was doing what he _wanted_!” you snarl.

“You _cut his legs off_!” Noir cries.

“For his own good!”

“Insanity,” Fox says.

“I’m fulfilling what he wants! I’m protecting him even now!” you yell back. Akechi’s hand is shaking with the effort of not pulling the trigger and ending this stupid fucking conversation right here. You don’t have the patience to argue with teenagers and their obnoxiously black and white sense of morality. “I have everything under control! I can fulfill what everyone wants, I can give Joker what he needs—”

Noir’s teeth flash, oddly white between her pale lips. “You’d kill him if you thought that’s what the captain needed.”

“ _That’s why I’m protecting him_ ,” you hiss.

Fox tries to place a hand on Noir’s shoulder, but she shakes him off. “No. I can’t believe I’m watching this again,” says Noir. “You’re manipulative, taking advantage of Joker when he’s down, justifying your selfish and harmful actions for your own satisfaction, parading yourself around as some sort of hero for the most despicable violence…!”

Her eyes narrow. “I take back what I said. You’re _just_ like Akechi.”

Joker’s fingers tighten around yours. You squeeze back.

“Joker,” says Noir.

“You can’t kill him,” Joker says immediately.

“ _You_ can’t,” Noir says.

Her axe hits the floor headfirst.

“I said _don’t_ ,” Joker says through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry that I will be going against your wishes,” says Noir. “I hoped that you would come to let go of Akechi in your own way. But as your friend, as someone _you_ helped grieve for someone I love—I cannot stand here and watch you consent to this.”

You can’t help but bare your teeth. You know that Joker wants to be stood up to, but this—this is just Noir imposing her own will upon him, taking advantage of his weakness. “That’s not your choice to make.”

“It wasn’t yours either,” Noir replies.

“Noir, this is _not_ the right time,” Fox whispers. “We don’t even have a full line-up, we need reinforcements…”

That means it’s _precisely_ the right time—for you, that is.

“No, by all means,” you say, and stand. “Let’s finish it. But you should know that you’re going to lose because you put Joker on the line.”

“Stop!” Joker says desperately. “Don’t do this—Noir, listen to me—”

You wrench Akechi’s hand from his, take three steps forward through the open doorway. In a sudden burst of strength, Joker wrenches at his cuffs, but the bolt holds firm to the wall. “ _Goro_!” Joker yells through the bolted door. “Goro, no, don’t do this, let me through— _listen_ to me—!”

You don’t. Is this what free will is like? Are these Goro Akechi’s actions, or your own?

Is it love, that you’ve spent your life trying to put yourself between the two people you serve and the line of fire? Or is it just a form of duty? Or is it just that you don’t know what else to do? Is it Joker’s will that you’re fulfilling here, or your own? Or is it just a series of unhappy events, far out of the control of either one of you, reaching its inevitable end point regardless of what you said or did or thought or became?

“Please don’t do this,” Joker’s voice cries.

You slam the door behind you.

“It’s only two against one…” Fox whispers. “We have no idea what it can do.”

“It’s four against one,” Noir replies.

You narrow your eyes. “Wh—”

“ _Astarte_!”

You barely have time to scream “ _Persona!_ ” before Astarte’s psychic energy blooms around you. Your Persona, still a shapeless, massless, unstable collection of limbs and blunt force, absorbs the matter into the empty space where its body should be, spitting it back out wildly in different directions when it’s unable to hold itself together. Astarte shrieks to suffer her own attack.

You launch yourself across the engine room at Noir, only to hiss and duck at a fresh round of bullets from Astarte that sends you scurrying away like a rat. You _hate_ Persona-users, how they use Personas like a teammate to cover their asses at every turn—honestly the only saving grace about Personas is that they can’t do any damage to physical objects or the ship itself, otherwise Astarte would have just shot down the door—

—focus. Your first matter has to be taking out the Personas, like you did Arsène. You know it can be done. Enough damage to the psyche, and they won’t be able to summon their Persona anymore.

Another hail of bullets, and you’re left cowering behind your own chaotic Persona imitation. You’re glad Joker is not here to see how little it resembles Akechi. “ _Kamu Susano-o_!” Fox calls, and you curse and spit at the ground as you run for your life in the opposite direction, chased by the growing ice along the metal floor that threatens to freeze you where you stand.

Not fast enough. Your footsteps stick to the metal, and Akechi’s voice gasps as the left foot stops dead, encased in ice that grows thickly up the boot sole towards the laces. “I’ll hold him down!” Fox declares. “Finish it, Noir!”

Astarte bursts into action, and in desperation you summon your Persona again to takes a round of bullets to its bodiless form without damage. And then, as if crushing a fly between her hands, Astarte crushes it easily between two slabs of psychic energy. Your Persona explodes in a soundless wave that knocks you to the floor.

A lightning strike zips up Akechi’s ankle. Still moored to the ground, the force of your Persona destabilizing has fractured the tip of Akechi’s bone. You stare in horror at Akechi’s foot—terrified at how normal it looks on the outside, but already feeling that insistent grind where the bone has split apart on the inside.

“ _Go!_ ” Fox cries, and Noir sprints through the last vestiges of your Persona’s combustion. You fire off a few shots that Susano-o deflects bodily, materializing between Noir and your gun with its hands held out like any protective god. You snarl and summon your damaged Persona again to slam itself into Susano-o, but it’s too late: Noir sprints like she was born for track, wrenches the door open, and slams it shut behind her.

You hear her voice exclaim, “Joker! I’m here! Hold still, I’ll cut the chain—”

You jerk and pull at the ice cementing you to the floor, but it holds fast. “ _Don’t you dare_!” you roar, raising your gun to point at the door handle.

Fox’s katana flashes.

One second Akechi’s hand is in front of your eyes holding the gun, and then it isn’t.

There’s a pause. Then you hear the cut-off hand hit the engine room floor with a wet _thud_.

That hand is Akechi’s—

That hand is the hand that Joker loves—

That hand _belongs to Joker_ —

“That was _his_!” you roar.

Fox skids smoothly between you and the door, Susano-o overgrown behind him. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“You hurt him,” you seethe.

“ _Him_?”

“You’re killing Akechi!”

Fox makes a face as if he’s just smelled something unpleasant. “You say that like it’s a loss.”

You scream and wrench your foot free. Akechi’s bones splinter inside. You dive for your gun.

Fox kicks the gun (and Akechi’s attached hand) away as best as he can, which is not very good. You kick him hard in the gut and use the momentum to springboard yourself after the weapon. You hear Fox’s katana streaking the floor long before you see him and scramble blindly to protect Akechi’s body, horrified to see his blade slide with an executioner’s precision through the space your neck used to be. You scrabble for your missing gun, roll to safety, only for his blade to just narrowly miss cutting off your whole foot and instead slice clean through the Achilles tendon.

The tendon snaps. Makes a sound like a piano wire breaking. You could cry to see Akechi’s body break. The body Joker loves in yet more pieces.

“Hurry _up_ , Noir! Joker!” Fox shouts, and then cries out in frustration as you push yourself up on the stump of your ruined arm, trailing blood from your tendon as you go, and use your momentum to push yourself into a limp straight at him.

Fox stands firm. He places his feet firmly and wide, his body physically between you and the door as Susano-o bursts ice crystals through the air. The katana streaks towards you with the slow-motion of the last moments of your life; entirely on instinct, you catch the blade in your ruined arm. The blade sticks fast to the bone. You shove it out of your way, lift his guard clear away, lunge with your last good leg. You level the gun between his eyes with your remaining hand and fire.

The porcelain fox mask shatters instantly. Fox’s tall, lanky frame leans backwards towards the door he was protecting so diligently. His sword slips out of your arm and hits the ground. The eyes lose focus; the white mask crumbles around his cheeks like an eggshell.

That’s what you get, you think, for defying what Joker wants.

He doesn’t fall fast enough. You shove the corpse hard at the door, where Fox’s limp head cracks against the metal, and slam your shoulder against his chest until the door cracks open.

The first thing you notice is that Noir seems to have forgone breaking Joker’s handcuffs chaining him to the wall in favor of giving him pants, which, for some reason, is _incredibly_ fucking annoying of her, in your opinion. Joker’s ankle chains, useless considering that Joker no longer has ankles, are pooled in the middle of the mattress. Frozen over Joker’s cot, Noir screams as you shove Fox’s corpse at her and she axes the thing in half on reflex, only for you to lunge through the pieces and fire once, twice, just barely missing her neck and then catching her high on the shoulder, too far away from anything vital to be useful. Her axe’s weight is still on the backswing from cutting Fox in half, leaving her wide open. You slam into her and knock both of you off your feet.

You struggle to orient yourself and pin her down. You’ve just got her on the floor and you’re about to jam the gun against her jaw when she right-hooks you with _surprising_ force, sending bright spots through your vision. There’s a thud of Noir’s fist crushing the air from Akechi’s lungs, wedged deep under the soft spot of his ribcage. She digs her fingers into your bloody arm stump until you shriek and drop the gun.

Astarte blows you clear off her, rolling across the floor towards Joker.

You roll with the momentum and pop back up and turn to see Noir’s axe sailing heavily through the air.

You don’t even get a chance. Even in the moment, you wish that you’d dodged, but Akechi’s body moves without thinking: you reach out to try and stop it with Akechi’s remaining hand, and the axe, heavy as hell and powered with more inertia than a single hand can stop, buries itself soundlessly through Akechi’s pelvis. You feel it shatter inside.

Akechi’s mouth opens. You think you are supposed to be feeling pain, but mostly the inside of your head feels blank.

You can see half the blade of Noir’s axe buried into the fabric of your pants. Underneath the fabric, into Akechi’s body. The tip of the blade rests somewhere one-third through Akechi’s pelvis, even, somewhere just above his thigh. The cut is so clean. The body isn’t even bleeding, with the axeblade lodged so firmly that not even a single drop leaks. It looks more like how an axe gets stuck in a tree trunk than anything else.

And then the chains wrap around your throat.

 _Ah_ , you think. _The chains from Joker’s ankles._ Joker’s still chained to the wall by his hands, but the chains you were using for his legs are more than long enough to strangle someone with. You kind of love how clever Joker is—how he never seems to give up, even when you think he’s long gone. Unfortunately, you are left to consider this in complete silence, as the pressure on your windpipe is so absolute that you can’t even make a sound.

You start wishing that you could when Noir pulls out the axe. You think about the man you shot in the hip as the flat metal grinds against the broken pieces of Akechi’s bones. You hope to whatever gods the captain believes in that the intestines aren’t going to fall out somehow.

Joker grunts through his mouth as he pulls the chain tighter. All arm strength, you marvel. Without getting any leverage from his legs, he pulls your back close against his chest, arms straining in your peripheral vision to pull even an inch tighter.

You aren’t sure if you’re supposed to go limp and let him kill you, but Akechi’s body fights for life anyway. His nails scrabble at his neck, at the chain, digging until you can feel Akechi’s skin break and leak blood. Isn’t this too much strength? Weren’t you trying to keep him weak and underfed exactly to avoid something like this? Did Noir heal him while you weren’t looking? Akechi’s hand gropes blindly for Joker’s.

And slowly, the chains ease up.

Whatever Noir sees over your shoulder in Joker’s face, her own eyes go wide with horror. “Joker?!”

“I can’t!” Joker says.

Noir bolts to ready her axe. “Do _not_ let him go—!”

He sounds frustrated with himself. “He’s dying!”

She grits her teeth, both hands on the handle of her axe, ready to swing. “Akechi is _already dead_!”

The chains go slack.

You elbow Joker hard in the gut. The second the chains slip from around your head, you lunge for Noir.

The chains rattle as Joker dives for you, hand outstretched, only for the chain bolting him to the wall to hold him back as you slip out of his reach. Astarte bursts back into life for just a moment, Noir’s axe swings wide over your head, before your fist collides with Noir’s face. She topples and hits the ground by Fox corpse and his katana. Blindly, her fingers scrabble for the katana’s hilt.

So you punch her square in the face.

Her nose crunches under your fist. With her back to the floor, her skull is pinned to the metal floor.

“ _Goro_!” Joker cries.

Noir looks so shocked you’d hit her, like it’s illegal when she’s the one who put an axe through your stomach. Like this isn’t exactly what she deserves for refusing what Joker desires. She has the doe-eyed, deer-in-headlights look of someone who thinks a pretty, polite, kind girl like herself couldn’t possibly have been hit _once_ , let alone that anyone could keep going.

You raise your fist.

“Goro, _please_!” Joker screams. You can hear the cuffs jangling as he tears against them. “I’ll stay with you, leave her alone, you don’t have to—"

You hit her again, harder, swinging with all your shoulder strength. Her whole body jerks. She doesn’t scream. The katana slips from her hands.

You hit her again, and again, and again, and one more time for good measure to feel something in her skull and Akechi’s remaining hand break. Under her black cloth mask, her beautiful face is a bloody mash of cartilage and skin flaps. You’re not sure she can even breathe through the wreckage, although her chest still moves, so she’s obviously not dead yet.

You exhale. Inhale. Gasp for air wetly. Your hand might be broken, but she’s gone still. All that so-called precious _free will_ gone to waste. All that defiance and lying and scheming under Joker’s nose, to nothing.

As it should be. There was never any other option for you. You don’t see why Noir should be the exception.

It’s quiet, then.

“It’s okay,” Akechi’s voice says.

When you turn to look, Joker is sitting on the floor, his arms twisted awkwardly around him where they’re still chained to the wall. His face is turned downwards, like he can’t even bear to look. Blood streams down his wrists.

“It’s okay,” Akechi’s voice says soothingly, but he doesn’t look up. “I’m almost there. I just have to finish the job.”

Joker is silent. So is Noir. Slowly, feeling an ache in Akechi’s body that probably shouldn’t be there, you drag yourself up off her, pulling yourself across the ground like a worm, since you don’t have an Achilles tendon in one leg and also only half a pelvis.

You brace yourself on your arm stump. With your good hand, you reach to pick her axe up off the floor. You’ll cut her damn head off with her own axe. If you can’t lift it with only one arm, you’ll just put the blade on her throat and press. “I’m doing this for you,” you say tiredly to Joker. “This is what you wanted.”

Joker’s head lifts. His wet eyes widen, and this is the only warning you get before pain blooms through your back.

You pause. You look down.

Your school shirt is tented, just the barest tip of Fox’s katana poking through a tear it couldn’t quite puncture. Your spine scrapes unpleasantly against the metal spearing you through as she twists the blade. Then Noir shoves harder, and the blade grows out of you in one long thrust. Involuntarily, Akechi’s body seizes. Blood begins to bubble from your chest down your stomach, licking hot like a tongue. Liquid pops in your throat when you breathe.

Behind you, Noir gasps. She rests her broken face against the back of Akechi’s shoulder, exhausted. You want to kill her for it, but you suddenly don’t have the strength. You can’t seem to make the body move anymore. Akechi’s heart squirms sluggishly against the blade. Slowly, Akechi sags, propped up on the sword, still held in place by Noir’s weight just inches out of Joker’s reach.

In wet, nasal heaves against your back, Noir begins to cry.


	14. Chapter 14

In the aftermath of anything, people wonder:

How did it come to this?

Why did this occur?

Whose fault is this?

What do I do now?

Who am I going to become?

*

Fox leaks through the engine room floor grates. On the other side of the room, the rest of Fox doesn’t so much as leak as he does unravel, all the slippery wet pieces sliding out along the opened top of his waist.

Noir drips liquids from her mangled face.

Akechi’s hand lies palm-up on the engine room floor.

You are the captain’s cognition of Goro Akechi, and you are dying.

*

Dying is a whole body process. A bit like being swallowed with cotton, except uncomfortable, because everything aches, and your muscles keep catching around the katana, and even your very bones seem badly placed within Akechi’s body. Your limbs are impossibly heavy, and every time you try to breathe, the skin of your chest splits itself open a little further along the sharp edge of the katana. You can feel Akechi’s heart in your chest, slowing with each beat, pumping blood in desperation to keep yourself alive and only pushing out more liquids through your open wounds.

You aren’t sure what to think about Noir’s hysterics. Akechi’s body is all out of energy. You wish that Noir would be a little quieter about crying. You think Joker probably doesn’t appreciate how much noise she’s making. You wish someone would hold Joker’s hand through all this noise, which must bother him as much as it bothers you. You wish it could be you.

*

You try to remember what you felt when you died. The first time, that is. When the captain’s cognition of you was first changed, and you were remade from the inside out.

You remember waking up on that deck surrounded by cognitions. An audience of sockpuppets, the captain’s heart staring at you like a foreigner with a multitude of different faces. _Are you alright? Are you hurt?_

You didn’t know how to answer. You’d said you were fine, just because you didn’t feel like sharing anything with them and you don’t know why they bothered to ask besides assuaging their own guilt. What had they expected you to say? And because you looked exactly the same as you had before, they all nodded and treated you exactly the same, except more fragile.

You were not fragile. You were different. You were new. You burst into tears immediately.

_I’m not the person you think you know_ , you’d wanted to say. _I’ve heard a lot about you from my past self, and I know of you, but you don’t know me. My past self and I look the same, but we have nothing to do with each other. In fact, everything that you think you know about me, you should probably throw away. Do not speak to me as who I was. There is no continuity. Who I was is no longer here. From now on, everything will be different_.

*

Noir’s face is a nightmare. You think she might be dying, and you think that Joker probably thinks that too, because he won’t stop begging her to give him her axe. Slowly, like she can barely understand him, she complies. Her hair is still oddly beautiful around the wreckage of her face. Whatever hair product she’s using to hold her curls, it damn well worked.

She crawls on the ground like a worm. No grace, not even a little. You wonder if she struggles like this because Joker told her to give him her axe, or if she fights this hard for her own sake, on her own will, for her own decisions. Heavily, she drags the axe across the door towards Joker, who strains at his handcuffs until the very tip of the handle reaches his fingers and he snatches it from her grip. “God, Noir,” Joker says, and you know that the next words out of his mouth are going to be _I’m sorry_ , and then, for some reason, he shuts his mouth and says nothing at all. He lifts the huge axehead in silence, and presses the blade to his chains until the links snap.

*

You wonder what that must be like, to fight to your last breath for your own sake.

You wonder if it’s freeing.

You wonder if it’s lonely.

*

You want to protest, but your lungs are punctured, and your vision is going dark, so you mostly just sit propped against the wall and watch as Joker pulls himself across the room on his stomach in nothing but his underwear. There, he pulls the healing supplies you took from him out of the drawer. You think you should have put the supplies in a drawer higher up. It would have been funny for the Phantom Thieves to come this far to save Joker, only to be foiled at the last second because Joker isn’t tall enough without his legs to get the healing beads.

When he feeds one to Noir, she manages to get a healing bead down her throat dry. You should be proud that you fucked up her face so badly that even the healing bead doesn’t fully repair her face. Her nose is still off. Her lips are lopsided, like melted wax. Akechi’s broken hand throbs.

Fox’s body starts to smell like stomach acid and shit. You don’t have it in you to make an expression with Akechi’s face as Noir throws up her own healing bead. Joker downs his in one swallow and screws his eyes shut until it stays down. You wonder why he refuses to look at you.

*

Ironically, the healing bead heals the skin over where Joker’s legs used to be. If anyone wanted to reconnect Joker’s legs to the rest of his body, they’ve done exactly the wrong thing. Now the damage is irreversible. That wasn’t necessarily your intention—if Joker is going to live a life separate from you, you wouldn’t want him to go without two limbs—but then again, you don’t really know what your intentions were, or if you had any of your own.

The revival bead doesn’t take with Fox, of course. There’s too much damage to the body, and he’s been dead a bit too long. Noir starts to cry again.

*

“H-He said that we should go back for reinforcements,” Noir is wheezing into her hands. “I should have… I should’ve listened, I shouldn’t have…”

For some reason, it’s Joker who has to hold her together. He’s covered in blood and sweat, and only just barely brought back from the brink of death entirely on magic fumes and no food or water, sitting on the floor with only stumps of his thighs to keep his balance, and it’s him who pulls her into a tight hug and holds her there, so she can cry it all out of her system. “It’s not your fault,” he murmurs. After the healing bead, his voice is surprisingly clear.

“I wasn’t even supposed to be here without everyone else, I wasn’t…”

“It’s not your fault,” says Joker. Slowly, from where Noir can’t see with her face buried in his shoulder, his eyes stare off into the dark, and you get the impression that he is not so much looking at anything as he is not looking at you.

*

Noir covers Fox’s body, at a safe distance from you, where you can’t reach them. Even from a distance, she looks on the verge of breaking into a new, fresh set of tears, the sort that scrapes the bottom of the barrel. She is past the overwhelmed tears, past the sweet tears, past the fat, healthy tears from the heart, and deep into the bitterest, exhausted, empty tears from not knowing what else to do. Joker just looks down at Fox’s body, saying nothing.

At last, when she’s all cried out of her fresh wave of tears, she wipes her face and winces at the tenderness of her newly healed nose. “We need to go. I’ll carry you,” she says, politely looking away from the stumps of Joker’s legs. “Let’s go quickly—”

You jerk. Noir goes still, like prey sensing a predator nearby.

“We have to get back to the entrance,” she says, in a much lower tone.

You jerk again, harder. The sword keeps you pinned. Akechi’s body is too heavy.

Joker’s back is turned to you, but even here you can see him shake his head. “You can’t carry me all the way back.”

“I can do it. I’m not leaving you here with…”

With Fox’s corpse? With the remains of Joker’s legs and bits of hacked off flesh? With you?

“It’s alright,” says Joker quietly. “I’ll be fine.”

“You can’t protect yourself.”

“I had a Soma. Arsène can protect me.”

To Noir’s credit, she tries to put his arm around her neck and lift him a few times, before concluding that she’s definitely not capable of carrying him even across the engine room, let alone up the three dozen stairs and ladders and walkways to the main floor of the ship. But even then, it’s only when Joker says, “Noir, it’s not just me. We can’t leave Fox here.”

Noir’s expression cracks. “It’s not your fault,” Joker says. His voice is remarkably calm. Maybe too calm. For the first time in a long time, he sounds like has all the answers, and is completely, entirely confident in them.

“If I’d just—if it’d been him who’d come into the room, maybe I could’ve held it off…”

Joker shakes his head. “Don’t.”

“If we’d fought together, had each o-other’s backs i-instead of—instead of splitting up…”

“Noir,” says Joker. “It’s not your fault.”

Noir wipes at her face.

“It’s not your fault.”

Noir shakes her head. “We w-weren’t even _supposed_ to c-come to the Metaverse without others—”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I—"

_Stop arguing with him_ , you snap.

The only thing that comes out of your punctured windpipe is a snarl. Noir freezes.

_He gave you an order_ , you say, or at least you intend to say, because most of what comes out of your throat is a liquidy warble and the harsh edges of an animal bark. _If he says it’s not your fault, then it isn’t. And you dare to talk back—_

“Don’t listen to him,” says Joker.

_You’re letting her be a coward!_ you try to say around the sword in your chest. _Come over here, Noir! Finish what you started! I’ll kill you myself—!_

“Noir, just ignore him,” says Joker urgently. “Go get help.”

You bare your teeth. _You think you’ve beaten me? I’ll rip your throat out with my bare teeth—!_

“Get the rest of the Thieves and we can carry Fox out of here,” says Joker.

Noir studies him with a brittle edge to her expression that hadn’t been there before. You swear your vision goes red at the corners—her fine-boned, feminine features daring to turn her nose up at Joker, to refuse him even now—

_Traitor!_ you scream from across the room. You struggle to pull yourself up, even you’re your body useless and pinned to the floor by the katana, missing limbs and blood and your voice a strangled, ruined mess of itself.

“Just go!” Joker says.

“If it’s not my fault,” says Noir, “then whose is it?”

_You think you can just do whatever you want?! You think you can defy him—?!_

“Just go, Noir!”

The second she reaches for the door, you know you will never again hate anyone the way you hate her in this moment. It pours out your mouth in shrieks, wailing that sounds nothing like Akechi at all, not even close to human. _You think that you can just tell him no?!_ the voice screams. _You think you can make your own decisions, have your own opinions, want whatever you like?! You think you actually deserve what you want?!_

Your voice is so scrambled that you can’t even understand yourself. “Stay safe,” says Noir, and hands Joker your own gun. “Don’t let it come near you.”

_I hate you! I hate you! I’ll kill you too!_ Akechi’s voice howls in the empty room

Noir’s last look at you is one of pity. And then she turns and runs.

_I’ll pull your spine out your throat! Then we’ll see how you’ll tell him no!_ the voice cries. _Run if you want, then! Run, bitch! Whore! Traitor! And don’t come back!_

*

You are crying for Joker. _Joker_ , your voice doesn’t say. Another one of Fox’s organs slips free. _Joker, please_ , you are calling. You are crying on the back deck, wondering where Joker has gone. You are on the front steps of the cruise liner, sobbing over why Joker is not here with you. You are at the railing, wondering if love is better if you choose it. _Joker_ , Akechi’s voice cries. _Joker_.

*

Joker’s voice says, “Shh. Don’t yell at her. It’s not her fault.”

Your vision keeps going in and out of focus. There are moments where you blink and time has passed. Moments of nonexistence that you don’t even notice because you weren’t there to see it. Akechi’s heart does not leap into your throat, because it is currently pinned to your ribcage by Fox’s katana. _Joker_ , Akechi’s voice attempts to say.

“I know,” Joker says, “whose fault it is.”

*

Alone, now that Noir is gone, Joker puts the revival bead in Fox’s mouth. By the time he’s done trying to put the two halves together, organs in the right places and the skin aligned, his arms are colored red up to the elbows. And then Joker looks at Fox, as if Fox is just going to stand right back up, and everything will go back to normal, all the consequences reversed.

Fox does not do that.

_He’s dead_ , you try to say.

Joker takes another revival kit, the one that looks put together by a medical professional. _You already tried that_ , you tell him, although of course the words do not come out. But Joker tries again, like a little kid trying to put back together a toy he’s broken; he goes through all the motions, waits a little longer, and Fox is still dead.

Slowly, his head turns towards the gun on the ground next to him. You can see the moment the idea takes hold.

_No_ , you say.

He looks at Fox. Looks back at the gun.

_No! If you kill yourself over a useless, irrelevant piece of shit like Fox, I_ will _destroy you, Joker!_

He reaches for it.

_I’ll cut the rest of your limbs off!_

Joker lifts the gun. Looks back at Fox.

The barrel of the gun tilts up.

_JOKER_ , you shriek. The only thing comes out is a wordless scream.

But Joker stops. “Alright,” he says soothingly, as if you are the one in distress somehow, and turns to face you. “You’re right. I’m coming.”

He drags himself closer to you, your gun resting in his lap, smearing Fox’s blood across the floor. Odd, how Joker’s the one with the most mobility out of the three of you—Joker, Fox, and you—and also the one with the most body parts. With blood finally leaking out your hip and Akechi’s missing hand, and Fox’s miscellaneous mis-mashed organs and body in two pieces, Joker looks practically healthy. He draws close to you, leans up against the wall alongside you. You can barely look at him from the corner of your eye as his thumb strokes your cheek.

_You aren’t leaving me?_ your voice—Akechi’s voice—your voice warbles into the ground. You are not sure your throat is working. Joker drags himself across the floor, getting closer. You are not sure any of these words are leaving your chest. _I won’t let her defy you anymore._

“Shhh,” says Joker. “You’re right, Goro. I should live with my mistakes.”

_Goro?_ you repeat dumbly.

“I know you would hate me if I took the coward’s way out.”

Joker peels you up off the wall and close to his chest, so you are huddled together, two broken bodies in the littered aftermath of yet another corpse, down the halfway line of the engine room. You’re not capable of much movement. Despite his own missing limbs, he lays you down gently on his lap—or what’s left of it—and turns you over carefully, cradling you to his waist. You can feel his hand grip the handle in the vibrations down the sword shaft, echoing in Akechi’s heart.

You gasp to feel him pulling it from your ribs. He goes slowly. You cannot tell if it is out of kindness or a desire to make the hurt last, but his newly-repaired arms are strong around you and you are lightheaded and it feels like he is pulling you out between your shoulder blades alongside the sword, gripped tight in his hands. You barely notice the edge slipping free.

Finally, he can lay you on your back, your face tilted up towards his. He just looks resigned.

“Better?” he says, in a voice that’s quiet enough to be gentle.

You are trying to keep your eyes open. Your eyes are drier than they should be, and you are not sure what will happen if you close them and let them stay closed. Joker lays your own gun heavy in the hollow of your stomach, just above where the sword used to be, so that he can pull your arms into a less uncomfortable position. You have the odd feeling that he is tucking you into bed.

_I’m sorry I couldn’t kill her_ , you try to say.

Joker’s expression doesn’t change, but the lines of sorrow carve deeper.

_But I won’t ever let you down again_ , you promise.

Joker traces a thumb across your face, wiping dirt and sweat and blood away from the delicate skin beneath your eye. “I really messed up this time.”

You can feel the sticky smear where Fox’s blood replaced whatever it was Joker was trying to smooth away. You are on the verge of trying to say, _It’s not your fault_ , before you stop to think. Joker wouldn’t want you to lie to him. But you don’t know if it _is_ a lie.

“I really, really messed up. Not like you. You were incredible. You always were. About everything.”

_I didn’t want to disappoint you._

“You were everything.” His eyes are dry. His voice is level. “You would never have let me make all these mistakes. You would have laughed at me if I tried to lead my own teammate to his death. You probably would have hit me for being so indecisive. You would have dragged me by the hair and made me do the right thing.”

You swallow. You realize that you didn’t swallow, because you can’t.

_I can still do all that for you_ , you say. You can’t understand your own words. _We can be everything to each other. We can run away together. Leave the rest of the Thieves behind. We can live together in the captain’s ship._

Joker smiles indulgently. “You’re right. You would have told me to stop being such an indecisive piece of shit and take responsibility for my mistakes. To make them right. You would have told me to live with what I’ve done.”

_I just want you to live at all. What do I have to do to convince you?_

“I’m sorry for letting you down. I’m making things right, now.”

_And will you love me then?_ you ask.

You keep shaking. It’s only when Joker winds his fingers through yours that you realize he’s comforting you, and that you are afraid of dying.

“And I never got to say it before,” Joker whispers. “I wanted you to know. I really love you, Goro.”

_I love you, too._

You wrap your remaining fingers—what’s left of them—around him. You curl your remaining hand tightly in his vest, leaning as close you can. With your head lying against Joker’s thigh and his face staring down at you, the dim light from the overhead shadows his image out completely. Just a silhouette without a face, large enough to blot out the sky.

Later, Joker will sit for some time by himself in the dark. Fox will be silent, having oozed and leaked as much as he can. You do not know what Akechi’s body will do when it is dead. You do not know what Joker’s face will look like as he sits there in the dark, waiting for his friends to arrive. You are sure that his friends will be earth-shatteringly loud, and that Panther will scream when Joker comes into sight and throw her arms around his neck. There will be _Oh my god_ s and _Joker!_ and the sounds of even more teenagers starting to cry. _You’re safe now_ , Panther will tell him. She will sound miserable for someone trying to be reassuring. _Akira, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of that. I’m so, so sorry_ … And you don’t know what Joker will do, then, because you do not know who he’ll be after that long wait in the dark, his back bowed, surrounded by the consequences of too many decisions.

For now, Joker bites his lip as he picks the gun up from your chest. When your fingers twitch, he holds them in his free hand, grips them tightly in a way he couldn’t have back when it’d still been punctured with the gunshot wound. He places the barrel of the gun under your chin, his finger on the trigger. Your skin is warm with Joker’s touch. You are Goro Akechi, and this means that you are going to die while Joker mourns. You pray that it’ll hurt when you die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [thanks for reading!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpizT5m9-_0&ab_channel=Florence%2BtheMachine-Topic)   
> 

**Author's Note:**

> twitter [@p5crimes](https://twitter.com/p5crimes)  
> tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)
> 
> [Art by @Poichanchan!](https://twitter.com/Poichanchan/status/1314646362793938944?s=20)   
>  [Art by @Poichanchan... TWO!](https://twitter.com/Poichanchan/status/1314670748758355974?s=20)   
>  [Art (for coping via memes...) by @BottomClown!](https://twitter.com/BottomClown/status/1314680482483843072?s=20)   
>  [Art by gabbyslovelymisfits!](https://www.instagram.com/p/CHgMuChFr2M/?igshid=8ipp6h3thb5t)


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